Hypothetical Tactical Option Question.

Jonathan_S wrote:Odds are the FF ship would fail to achieve energy range even if it knew exactly where the base was.

kzt wrote:SDM range is a lot easier to achieve. Which might be attacking a ship without a wedge.

Jonathan_S wrote:Yep, then you only need to be within roughly 7-8 million km (depending on relative vectors). And if the target's wedge is fully offline it'll take longer than the 3 minutes missile flight to get it up.

So that target should still have time to get off CMs and PDLCs, but it'll lack wedge and sidewalls - making it a far more vulnerable target.

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 38 wrote:Citizen Rear Admiral Gregor Darlington swore with silent savagery as the plot stabilized. He felt his astrogator cringing behind him, and he wanted to turn around and rip the unfortunate citizen commander a brand-new rectum. It would have done the citizen admiral an enormous amount of good to vent his fury, but he couldn't. It wasn't really Citizen Commander Huff's fault, and even if it had been, Darlington would never have raked him down in front of a people's commissioner. The People's Navy had given up enough martyrs as scapegoats.
"I see we seem to have misplaced a decimal point, Gorg," he said instead, unable to keep an edge of harshness out of his voice, however hard he tried. Then he cleared his throat. "How bad is it?"
"We . . . overshot by one-point-three light-minutes, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Huff replied. "Call it twenty-three-point-seven million klicks."
"I see." Darlington folded his hands behind him and rocked on his toes, digesting the information. Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as "overshot" might be taken to imply, he thought grimly. Task Group 12.4.2 had been supposed to emerge from hyper four million klicks from the Basilisk terminus, headed directly towards it with a velocity of five thousand kilometers per second. That would have put them in missile range and firing by the time the defenders could realize they were coming. And with any luck at all, the picket force normally stationed on the terminus would have been headed in-system at max for a full hour, which would have put those ships safely out of the way and left only the two operational forts to deal with. Thirty-two million tons of fort would still have been a handful, but he had eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers— a better than three-to-one edge in tonnage—and he should have had the invaluable advantage of complete and total surprise, as well.
But Citizen Commander Huff had blown it. In fairness, it was expecting a great deal to ask anyone to cut a hyper translation that close, but that was exactly what he'd been trained for years to do . . . and the reason TG 12.4.2 had dropped back into n-space less than two light-months out to allow him to recalibrate and recalculate. And he hadn't actually missed it by all that much, had he? His error was—what? Less than two-thousandths of a percent of the total jump? But it was enough.

Vince wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Odds are the FF ship would fail to achieve energy range even if it knew exactly where the base was.

kzt wrote:SDM range is a lot easier to achieve. Which might be attacking a ship without a wedge.

Jonathan_S wrote:Yep, then you only need to be within roughly 7-8 million km (depending on relative vectors). And if the target's wedge is fully offline it'll take longer than the 3 minutes missile flight to get it up.

So that target should still have time to get off CMs and PDLCs, but it'll lack wedge and sidewalls - making it a far more vulnerable target.

Even getting into single drive missile range can be difficult (MDM or even DDM range, especially with a ballistic flight component, is another thing entirely). Witness what happened to the PRN when they tried it against the Basilisk terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction

Sigs wrote:

Vince wrote:Even getting into single drive missile range can be difficult (MDM or even DDM range, especially with a ballistic flight component, is another thing entirely). Witness what happened to the PRN when they tried it against the Basilisk terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction

Ok but how much of the failure of TG 12.4.2 to get close was because of experience or lack there of and how much was it because of the task itself? There could be a lot of FF officers who could be competent to make the target with a HC division or a BC division.

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 38 wrote:But Citizen Commander Huff had blown it. In fairness, it was expecting a great deal to ask anyone to cut a hyper translation that close, but that was exactly what he'd been trained for years to do . . . and the reason TG 12.4.2 had dropped back into n-space less than two light-months out to allow him to recalibrate and recalculate. And he hadn't actually missed it by all that much, had he? His error was—what? Less than two-thousandths of a percent of the total jump? But it was enough.

A Rising Thunder, Chapter 20 wrote:“Nice job, Yvonne,” he said out loud.
“Thank you, Sir,” Admiral Yvonne Uruguay replied.
Eleventh Fleet’s alpha translation had been as neat as any Filareta had ever seen, with minimal scatter of its units and on almost the exact heading he’d wanted. Oh, Uruguay had been off slightly—he’d wanted to shave the margin on the hyper limit even tighter—but that was inevitable after such a long hyper trip. The hyper log gave an astrogator a reasonably accurate running position, but “reasonably accurate” over interstellar distances could leave just a bit to be desired, and allowing for the difference in intrinsic velocities between departure point and the arrival star system could be tricky, too. Getting an entire fleet to the right place at the right time, in the right formation, and keeping it that way through an alpha translation while simultaneously carrying the desired relative velocity across the hyper wall was an art, as well as science, in a lot of ways.
On the other hand, skilled at her job or not, Uruguay would have been much too senior for a staff astrogator in most navies, even on the staff of a fleet the size of Filareta’s current command. He knew that, and ever since this business with the Manties had blown up, he’d been thinking about the rank inflation that was such an integral, ancient, and time-honored part of the Solarian League Navy.

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 33 wrote:Now Tourville grinned crookedly at the memory. Perhaps there were some advantages to promotion after all, he mused. But then his thoughts slipped back to the little matter of astrogation, and he leaned back in his chair with a quiet sigh which he hoped concealed the tension coiling tighter in his midsection from any of his juniors.
Karen Lowe was an excellent astrogator, but a hyper voyage this long provided a great deal of scope for minor astrogation errors to produce major results. Overshooting their intended n-space translation point wouldn't be all that terrible . . . unless, of course, they overshot it too badly. A ship which attempted to translate out of hyper inside a star's hyper limit couldn't. As long as it made the attempt within the outer twenty percent of the hyper limit, all that happened was that it couldn't get into n-space. If it made the attempt any further in than that, however, Bad Things happened. Someone had once described the result as using a pulse cannon to fire soft-boiled eggs at a stone wall to see if they would bounce. Lester Tourville rather doubted they would, and even if he was wrong, it was a proposition he had no desire at all to test firsthand.
And that was what made the nervous serpent shift and slither in his belly as the digital display counted down towards the translation, because after a voyage of over a light-century and a half, it would take an error of only one five-millionth of a percent to give them all an egg's-eye view of that stone wall. He trusted Citizen Commander Lowe implicitly . . . but he couldn't quite shut his mind off when it yammered about teeny-tiny errors and misplaced decimal points.
And, he thought dryly, your having supported Shannon's insistence on coming in fast and hot won't make things any easier for Karen, now will it?
It wouldn't, and he knew it. But he wasn't about to change his mind, either, because his tac witch was right. His task force was in the lowest alpha band, traveling at .6 c and headed for a crash translation. He knew what most of his crews were going to have to say about that, but they should have plenty of time to stop throwing up before the Manties could come into range. And by hitting the wall at roughly a hundred and eighty thousand kilometers per second, he would carry an n-space velocity of a bit more than fourteen thousand KPS across it with him.

Vince wrote:Even getting into single drive missile range can be difficult (MDM or even DDM range, especially with a ballistic flight component, is another thing entirely). Witness what happened to the PRN when they tried it against the Basilisk terminus of the Manticore Wormhole Junction:

Echoes of Honor, Chapter 38 wrote:Citizen Rear Admiral Gregor Darlington swore with silent savagery as the plot stabilized. He felt his astrogator cringing behind him, and he wanted to turn around and rip the unfortunate citizen commander a brand-new rectum. It would have done the citizen admiral an enormous amount of good to vent his fury, but he couldn't. It wasn't really Citizen Commander Huff's fault, and even if it had been, Darlington would never have raked him down in front of a people's commissioner. The People's Navy had given up enough martyrs as scapegoats.
"I see we seem to have misplaced a decimal point, Gorg," he said instead, unable to keep an edge of harshness out of his voice, however hard he tried. Then he cleared his throat. "How bad is it?"
"We . . . overshot by one-point-three light-minutes, Citizen Admiral," Citizen Commander Huff replied. "Call it twenty-three-point-seven million klicks."
"I see." Darlington folded his hands behind him and rocked on his toes, digesting the information. Of course, it wasn't quite as simple as "overshot" might be taken to imply, he thought grimly. Task Group 12.4.2 had been supposed to emerge from hyper four million klicks from the Basilisk terminus, headed directly towards it with a velocity of five thousand kilometers per second. That would have put them in missile range and firing by the time the defenders could realize they were coming. And with any luck at all, the picket force normally stationed on the terminus would have been headed in-system at max for a full hour, which would have put those ships safely out of the way and left only the two operational forts to deal with. Thirty-two million tons of fort would still have been a handful, but he had eight dreadnoughts, twelve battleships, and four battlecruisers— a better than three-to-one edge in tonnage—and he should have had the invaluable advantage of complete and total surprise, as well.
But Citizen Commander Huff had blown it. In fairness, it was expecting a great deal to ask anyone to cut a hyper translation that close, but that was exactly what he'd been trained for years to do . . . and the reason TG 12.4.2 had dropped back into n-space less than two light-months out to allow him to recalibrate and recalculate. And he hadn't actually missed it by all that much, had he? His error was—what? Less than two-thousandths of a percent of the total jump? But it was enough.

Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.

Weird Harold wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:All of the Apollo and Mark 23 pods stay home because the Roland's can't use them. We'll assume I'm going to arrive with full pod loadouts that I can use "hot" upon arrival.

Why wouldn't the Roland be able to use The Mk23/Apollo pods. Granted the Apollos would have to be used in light-speed mode as they were at Spindle, but the pods are the same size and shape as the Mk 16 pods.

As far as I can tell, any RMN ship can control any RMN missile with light-speed control links, so the only reason to leave the MK23 and Apollo behind would be concern over a force the Mk16G isn't big enough to hurt and/or to give the Chanson class destroyer the reach and punch to defend your supply dump against anything.

Jonathan_S wrote:snip

And if the target's wedge is fully offline it'll take longer than the 3 minutes missile flight to get it up.

So that target should still have time to get off CMs and PDLCs, but it'll lack wedge and sidewalls - making it a far more vulnerable target.