The mandarins

pnakasone wrote:One problem is at the moment they have only a limited supply of their missiles. They have to choose their fights with care as to what will have the most return for the expenditure of the ordnance. Then there is very good odds that you will get the SLN admiral that will think he can win the fight or you are bluffing.

In one sense, yes since they aren't producing more they have a limited supply of missiles. However that fixed supply was large enough that White Haven (I think it was White Haven) wasn't sure if they'd have enough to defeat the SLN after first defeating Haven.

But since they never resumed fighting with Haven they should have more than enough missiles in their supply to kill every remaining ship in the SLN, plus anything they can build in the next couple years. So even without Haven supplying ships or missiles I think Manticore would be fine on the naval combat side. If nothing else they should be able to rebuild missile production faster than the SLN can design and build competitive warships.

pnakasone wrote:One problem is at the moment they have only a limited supply of their missiles. They have to choose their fights with care as to what will have the most return for the expenditure of the ordnance. Then there is very good odds that you will get the SLN admiral that will think he can win the fight or you are bluffing.

The ordinance limits are short term. Beowulf will soon be refilling their magazines and at that point it doesn't matter how many such guards shoot themselves dry. Besides, it doesn't really matter. A dead SLN ship is a dead SLN ship no matter what system the battle occurred in and the more Sollies that realize that it's suicide for the commander of any fleet to come up against the GA the faster morale problems will be tearing them apart.

Jonathan_S wrote:

pnakasone wrote:One problem is at the moment they have only a limited supply of their missiles. They have to choose their fights with care as to what will have the most return for the expenditure of the ordnance. Then there is very good odds that you will get the SLN admiral that will think he can win the fight or you are bluffing.

In one sense, yes since they aren't producing more they have a limited supply of missiles. However that fixed supply was large enough that White Haven (I think it was White Haven) wasn't sure if they'd have enough to defeat the SLN after first defeating Haven.

But since they never resumed fighting with Haven they should have more than enough missiles in their supply to kill every remaining ship in the SLN, plus anything they can build in the next couple years. So even without Haven supplying ships or missiles I think Manticore would be fine on the naval combat side. If nothing else they should be able to rebuild missile production faster than the SLN can design and build competitive warships.

Not to mention that they also have access to all those Havenite missiles. They won't be nearly as deadly as Apollo but they'll still smash things pretty well (SLN defenses still are anemic vs missiles coming in at half of lightspeed) and the Havenite production line is untouched.

munroburton wrote:Granted, there are some logistical problems in that their missiles won't fit into RMN magazines and launchers and their pods won't fit into RMN pod rails. But every one of those missile pods Honor used could have been Havenite - we weren't told what they actually fired at Filareta.

Good point. There simply was no need to fire Manticoran missiles at Second Manticore. The amount of damage we saw could have been inflicted entirely with towed Havenite pods. They did expend a goodly number of Manticoran countermissiles, though.

Weyland probably had a prototyping production line. A pro pro line is used to iron out potential problems in production of new systems like whether a part should be installed in step 76 or step 150 or module 16 installed in step 543 or in step 746.

saber964 wrote:Weyland probably had a prototyping production line. A pro pro line is used to iron out potential problems in production of new systems like whether a part should be installed in step 76 or step 150 or module 16 installed in step 543 or in step 746.

The problem is that when you go to build this somewhere else every single part on your parts list doesn't exist. For example, you can't buy the pump that circulates liquid hydrogen to cool your antenna array because the plant that built it blew up, along with the machine tools that made it, the people who ran the machine tools and the people who designed the pump. It's perfectly possible that there are no existing design documents for that pump.

And that pump wasn't a random selection, it was carefully selected (and then that selection was verified by a highly experienced design engineer) from the universe of cryo pumps to both fit in the space, power and vibration budget, it was made by a reliable supplier and and was made by process that could supply huge numbers that were going to be reliable and made to spec.

Then that pump was extensively tested to determine that it actually would work under a wide range of possible situations, then it was tested as part of the antenna array, then the entire antenna array was tested as part of the guidance module, then eventually the entire completed missile, composed of thousands of these parts, was then extensively tested to ensure it worked under a wide range of storage conditions (temperature, vibration, gravity shocks, EMP, etc), operating environments, and under the kind of intense radiation you get in combat.

So now you have to select another model of pump, made by a range of vendors on another planet. What kind of relationship do you think the RMN and contractor design engineers have with the industrial supply base on Beowulf compared to the one on Manticore that has been obliterated? Who are the reliable vendors? How long will it take to find another pump that has all the correct specifications, can be produced in huge numbers soon, and will it be within spec? Then it has to go through the entire qualification process.

This goes on for every single part of the missile. It's why we can't build a Saturn V today.

Loren Pechtel wrote:

munroburton wrote:Granted, there are some logistical problems in that their missiles won't fit into RMN magazines and launchers and their pods won't fit into RMN pod rails. But every one of those missile pods Honor used could have been Havenite - we weren't told what they actually fired at Filareta.

Good point. There simply was no need to fire Manticoran missiles at Second Manticore. The amount of damage we saw could have been inflicted entirely with towed Havenite pods. They did expend a goodly number of Manticoran countermissiles, though.

Problem: If my reading of that scene proves correct, Filareta fired directly at Honor. So, simple for self defense reasons (and to make sure, that the sollie missiles did not accidentally destroy some of the deployed pods, for example) she had to fire not only in a defensive mode at the incoming missiles, but at the Sollie-SD's, too. After all, her 40 SD(P)s were the force nearest to Filareta, so the potential danger was the greatest for her part of Grand Fleet. I doubt, that the Sollie OPS officer had any time to adress the missiles to the other targets suddenly available (even if he had the intention to do so)

Eagleeye wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Good point. There simply was no need to fire Manticoran missiles at Second Manticore. The amount of damage we saw could have been inflicted entirely with towed Havenite pods. They did expend a goodly number of Manticoran countermissiles, though.

Problem: If my reading of that scene proves correct, Filareta fired directly at Honor. So, simple for self defense reasons (and to make sure, that the sollie missiles did not accidentally destroy some of the deployed pods, for example) she had to fire not only in a defensive mode at the incoming missiles, but at the Sollie-SD's, too. After all, her 40 SD(P)s were the force nearest to Filareta, so the potential danger was the greatest for her part of Grand Fleet. I doubt, that the Sollie OPS officer had any time to adress the missiles to the other targets suddenly available (even if he had the intention to do so)

I also read that as the Cataphracts being fired directly at Honor. So she'd have to fire back any towed pods, otherwise they'd be lost when the incoming fire arrived.

But I suppose Loren Pechtel might also be correct - Honor's fleet might have been towing Havenite pods, and fired those, keeping their internal Mk23 pods in reserve. (That would require some pre-battle coordination with Haven, and making sure there was some way to control those missile (which could be RHN ships embedded in Honor's formation, or it might be software updates to let RMN fire control talk to Havenite missiles)

Or Honor might have fired off some of the Mk23's her fleet carried. But I don't see that she fired anywhere near all of them - and her fleet isn't all the SD(P)s Manticre has (much less the ammo ships, any stockpiles at Trevor's Star or other forward based, etc). One quick battle with the SLN wouldn't have run Manticore out of their post Oyster Bay stockpiles of missiles.

People build and code their missiles to make them very difficult for enemy ships to use or control them. It's like Russia giving the US Navy a couple of hundred containerized P-800s for use next Tuesday. Nothing on a USN ship can connect to them for any purpose. The bolt patterns are different, the connectors will not match, even the voltage and frequency of outside power will be different. And once you build all the hardware to get a physical connection you then need to write a huge bunch of code to integrate the fire control systems so you can you feed them targeting data, then extensively test it to ensure it really works like you expect, as having a mach 2.5 missile get a bit confused as to the target would probably work out badly. The most effective way you could use them offensively next Tuesday would be to drop them from cargo helicopters onto enemy ships.

kzt wrote:People build and code their missiles to make them very difficult for enemy ships to use or control them. It's like Russia giving the US Navy a couple of hundred containerized P-800s for use next Tuesday. Nothing on a USN ship can connect to them for any purpose. The bolt patterns are different, the connectors will not match, even the voltage and frequency of outside power will be different. And once you build all the hardware to get a physical connection you then need to write a huge bunch of code to integrate the fire control systems so you can you feed them targeting data, then extensively test it to ensure it really works like you expect, as having a mach 2.5 missile get a bit confused as to the target would probably work out badly. The most effective way you could use them offensively next Tuesday would be to drop them from cargo helicopters onto enemy ships.

What may help is the RMN had up to a year of crawling all over Tourville's captured and data-unpurged Second Fleet, as well as all the other captured Havenite stuff from the first war(IIRC, the RHN used off-the-shelf components where they could). Even if the primary study concluded it wasn't viable to buy them into service, back burner projects might continue.

So it's not completely out of the question a team on HMSS Weyland was working on it. And as we know, they mostly survived and their data was frequently backed up to a planetside facility.