The Apollo Triple Ripple

kzt wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:But McKeon's ships were autonomous and tasked to take on Chin's forces. McKeon could have stacked lots and lots of pods before he launched them in a big wave and slapped Chin's forces silly.

No, they were under her control and attached to 3rd fleet, so when she directed 3rd fleet to not roll pods because of PLOT they didn't roll any pods.

It's all PLOT. All of the insane things that Kuzak directs 3rd fleet to do are there solely to efficiently get them destroyed so Honor can come in to save the day. Hence, after she and her CoS list all the advantages 3rd fleet has on 2nd she then methodically throws every single one away without anyone objecting. There is a reason I refer to AAC as that awful book.

Vince wrote: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: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.
* * *
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***

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).

Rakhmamort wrote:

darrell wrote:
You all are forgetting something. The range was beyond the range that the apollo control missile could talk to honors SDP's.

She used a hermes buoy as a relay. The data capacity of the ship to Hermes buoy to missiles was 60 pods. My guess is that the limitation is in keyhole two. IMO 60 Mk-23-E missiles is probably the limit that one keyhole 2 pod could control. The other option would be 30 missiles per keyhole 2, or 60 per ship, but IMO this is unlikely, because it provides no redundancy and a maximum 1 minute salvo size.

Huh? What? Where are all these things written? A Hermes bouy being used as control links for 60 pods worth of missiles, range limits of Apollo etc...

darrell wrote:

Rakhmamort wrote:
Huh? What? Where are all these things written? A Hermes bouy being used as control links for 60 pods worth of missiles, range limits of Apollo etc...

Quote: At all Costs:
"Missile trace!" Frazier Adamson barked suddenly, and Lester Tourville's belly muscles clenched.
What was left of Third Fleet had stopped firing when he did. Were they insane enough to resume the action? If they did, he'd have no choice but to—
"Sir, they're coming in from outside the zone!" Adamson said.
"What?" Molly DeLaney demanded incredulously. "That's ridiculous! They're a hundred fifty million klicks away!"
"Well, they're coming in on us now anyway," Tourville said sharply as Guerriere's missile defense batteries began to fire once more.
They didn't do much good. He watched sickly as the missiles which had suddenly brought up their impellers, appearing literally out of nowhere, hurtled down on his battered and broken command. They drove straight in, swerving, dancing, and his sick feeling of helplessness frayed around the edges as he realized there were less than sixty of them. Whatever they were, they weren't a serious attack on his surviving ships, so what—?


Quote: "Mission of Honor"
“Yes.” He leaned forward, propping his forearms on his thighs, and his eyes were very sharp. “The other ‘bluff’ I’ve been wondering about is whether or not you really could have done it from that range?”
Honor swung her chair from side to side in a small, thoughtful arc while she considered his question. Theoretically, what he was asking edged into territory covered by the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he was going to be e-mailing the information to the Octagon. Besides . . . 
“No,” she said after no more than two or three heartbeats. “I couldn’t have. Not from that range.”


Things we know:
1. There is a maximum range for the Mk-23 E apollo control missile
2. Honor had multiple SDP's with apollo pods. Each SDP could control at least 240 attack missles (30 pods) and probably at least double that.
3. Less than 60 total missiles fired means 6 or 7 pods worth of missiles. 6*9=54, 7*8=56
4. Since Honor could not have destroyed 3rd fleet from 150Mkm, that had to be outside the direct range of apollo.

My belief that the reason that so few missiles was fired was because Honor was using the hermies buoy as an FTL relay. The fact that only 6 or 7 pods (probably 7) were fired as a demonstration meant that that was probably the maximum that could have been controlled, I.E. the maximum bandwidth for a Hermes buoy.

Rakhmamort wrote:So how come Alistair's Apollo attacks on Chin's forces were only using a limited amount of missiles. If they can stack 3 or 4 salvos of Apollo pods, they could have been doing a hell of a lot more damage to Chin's forces.

SharkHunter wrote:I'm going to argue that McKeon's ships were likely firing everything they could, as often as they could given the trap they were in, no time to stack much of anything. The bigger tactical 'plot' mistake, IMO was to target a single Havenite SD per salvo. Hitting four times as many ships at a time, even with 1/4 of the missiles -- at least some of those hits were going to affect command and control, plus take out the ability of more ships to hit back. Assuming that even 'a fourth of the fourth" takes out a command deck or an inertial compensator, McKeon's ships would have had a higher kill ratio. That's a force multiplier right there.

I think of it this way -- if you've got twenty bombers carrying nukes headed in, do you try to shoot down one bomber at a time, or damage every bomber you can, even in more limited ways?

kzt wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I'm going to argue that McKeon's ships were likely firing everything they could, as often as they could given the trap they were in, no time to stack much of anything. The bigger tactical 'plot' mistake, IMO was to target a single Havenite SD per salvo. Hitting four times as many ships at a time, even with 1/4 of the missiles -- at least some of those hits were going to affect command and control, plus take out the ability of more ships to hit back. Assuming that even 'a fourth of the fourth" takes out a command deck or an inertial compensator, McKeon's ships would have had a higher kill ratio. That's a force multiplier right there.

I think of it this way -- if you've got twenty bombers carrying nukes headed in, do you try to shoot down one bomber at a time, or damage every bomber you can, even in more limited ways?

It's more like this. You have 200 bombers in your underground hardened aircraft shelter all loaded up and ready to go as soon as they get to the runway, but it takes a minute per bomber to deploy them from your shelter. You can't start the war, but as soon as you detect the enemy you can launch all your planes. If you are expecting the first event of the war is your base being attacked by a raid of bombers carrying bombs that can destroy your shelter and they will likely be attacking in the next two hours, when should you start to move the aircraft out to the runways so they are all ready to take off when the war starts? Now, or when you detect the attacking aircraft 10 minutes out?

kzt wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:I'm going to argue that McKeon's ships were likely firing everything they could, as often as they could given the trap they were in, no time to stack much of anything. The bigger tactical 'plot' mistake, IMO was to target a single Havenite SD per salvo. Hitting four times as many ships at a time, even with 1/4 of the missiles -- at least some of those hits were going to affect command and control, plus take out the ability of more ships to hit back. Assuming that even 'a fourth of the fourth" takes out a command deck or an inertial compensator, McKeon's ships would have had a higher kill ratio. That's a force multiplier right there.

I think of it this way -- if you've got twenty bombers carrying nukes headed in, do you try to shoot down one bomber at a time, or damage every bomber you can, even in more limited ways?

It's more like this. You have 200 bombers in your underground hardened aircraft shelter all loaded up and ready to go as soon as they get to the runway, but it takes a minute per bomber to deploy them from your shelter. You can't start the war, but as soon as you detect the enemy you can launch all your planes. If you are expecting the first event of the war is your base being attacked by a raid of bombers carrying bombs that can destroy your shelter and they will likely be attacking in the next two hours, when should you start to move the aircraft out to the runways so they are all ready to take off when the war starts? Now, or when you detect the attacking aircraft 10 minutes out?

SharkHunter wrote:Puzzled... Oh, got it -- I think. you're saying, "why didn't McKeon get ready like Honor did ahead of time so that on arrival they could start tearing the crap out of Tourville's units (?) Because Chin hadn't hypered in yet -- which is where my "no time to stack salvo" thought takes over, yes?