Weird Harold wrote:Theemile wrote:I guess this doesn't say anything about maximum capability, but it does suggest a lower end of the ceiling.
Au contraire.
The Battle of Manticore was a do or die situation and the RMN should have been sending everything possible at the RHN. If those numbers suggest anything, they would suggest a maximum rather than a minimum.
Go back and look at Theemile's full post. It specifically refers
only to 8th fleet (Harrington) controlling missiles in the salvo it fired at 5th Fleet (Chin). It isn't concerned with D'Orville's (Home Fleet), Kuzak's (3rd Fleet) fire at 2nd Fleet (Tourville), or Alistair McKeon's (attached to 3rd Fleet) fire at 5th Fleet (Chin).
At All Costs, Chapter 68 wrote:Honor Alexander-Harrington's eyes were brown ice as Theophile Kgari, in a virtuoso display of astrogation, dropped the massed superdreadnoughts of Eighth Fleet exactly where she'd told him to in a single jump right out of the center of the resonance zone.
She didn't look at the pathetic remnants of Third Fleet's icons. Didn't even glance at the other icons, representing Lester Tourville's task force. She had attention only for Genevieve Chin's superdreadnoughts, and her voice was a frozen soprano sword.
"Engage the enemy, Andrea," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington said.
* * *
Genevieve Chin's heart began beating once again, and her instant instinct to break off eased a bit as the range registered. At almost seventy-three million kilometers, the new arrivals were well outside even MDMs' powered range. Besides, there were only thirty-eight of them—less than half her own strength, even if all of them were wallers and not carriers.
"Turn us around, Andrianna," she said. "It looks like we've got some fresh customers."
* * *
Eighth Fleet released the five thousand Apollo pods which had been tractored to its SD(P)s' hulls, then spent another three minutes rolling additional pods. In all, it deployed a total of 7,776, almost exactly half its total ammunition allotment, given the Andermani ships' lighter magazine capacity.
Then it fired.
***Snip***
"Drives going active . . . now, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said, and the missiles thirteen million kilometers short of Fifth Fleet suddenly brought their final drive stages on-line. Their icons burned abruptly bright and strong once again as they lit off their impellers . . . and hurled themselves at their targets under full shipboard control.
They blazed in across the remaining distance, tracking with clean, lethal precision, and their ballistic flight had dropped them off of the Republic's sensors. Chin's ships knew approximately where they were, but not exactly, and their supporting EW platforms and penetration aids came up with their impellers. They hurtled in across the Republican SD(P)s' defensive envelope at over half the speed of light, and the sudden eruption of jamming, of Dragon's Teeth spilling false targets, hammered those defenses mercilessly.
The fact that the missile defense crews aboard those ships had known, without question, that the attacking missiles would be clumsy, half-blind, only made a disastrous situation even worse.
Eighth Fleet had deployed almost eight thousand pods. Those pods launched 69,984 missiles. Of that total, 7,776 were Apollo birds. Another 8,000 were electronic warfare platforms. Which meant that 54,208 carried laser heads—laser heads which homed on Genevieve Chin's ships with murderously accurate targeting.
Fifth Fleet's missile defenses did their best.
Their best was not good enough.
Italics are the author's, boldface is my emphasis.
Note that Honor left all her CLACs at Trevor's Star prior to bringing in the remainder of her SDs through the Junction in a mass transit, so the figure of 38 is all wallers (I don't know how many of that 38 had Keyhole II).
