First New Manticore Ships

Yeah... as you said in the thread you linked, topic over, better to let it rest

--snipping, hope I chopped this right--

Star Knight wrote:

SharkHunter wrote:Previously argued of course but the biggest plotted "mistake" was that d'Orville didn't saturate the oncoming RN S(p)s with enough MDMs in a steady stream to keep 2nd Fleet from deploying pods to begin with. That cost him his entire fleet.

Well if we ignore RFCs off hand comments on Zanzibar, he didn't know about Donkey.

Doesn't matter if he knew about the Forraker's donkey or not. The moment the RN ships slowed, he should have started firing boomers and pen-aids, because a stream of missiles keeps 2nd Fleet from effectively stack-deploying ANY pods, and Home Fleet was outnumbered 3:1. At WORST he forces Tourville's ships to maneuver, wasting valuable time, spot smaller salvo(s), etc. Wet navy-- look at the Battle of Midway for a comparable --> though not coordinated, the initial attacks kept the IAN from setting up an effective counter-attack, and ultimately that was the decisive advantage.

Star Knight wrote:Well if we ignore RFCs off hand comments on Zanzibar, he didnt know about Donkey.

It doesn't matter, when you have a lifetime supply of ammo, it makes no sense to to not utilize it to keep your enemy from operating as they want. If you never shoot you will never do any damage. The odds of any given long-range missile hitting are not great, but they are not trivial and it forces the enemy to react to what you are doing as they close, not to do whatever they want to do.

You know absolutely that MDM ships normally deploy large number of pods prior to combat, any steps you can take to screw that up are good, not taking steps to prevent your enemy from implementing tactics that are obviously dangerous to your force is obviously not good.

The bigger issue is how did it happen that Home fleet didn't have a single recon drone? Not just deployed, which they should have had some cruising outside the hyper limit given that they have at least 600 and can trivially service and reuse them, but not a single one was launched to see what the attacking fleet was doing. Were they all taken away to be gold plated as part of the Queen's birthday celebration?

Lets have some fun with AAC….

The question is what would have happened without Donkey.

D’Orville thought he was on a death ride no matter what and so he went with the fire plan that was supposed to inflict as much damage on the enemy as possible.

Opening up at closer range increases the effectiveness of his missiles, launching as soon as possible lets him fire (much) more with (somewhat) reduced effectiveness.
I don’t think we can accurately judge how much more effective the missiles would be at close ranges.

And as far as I understand his reasoning, he expected to die rather quickly, regardless of the range.
This is from when he decides to go in close:
‘How far do you want to close before opening fire, Sir? - They're going to bury us whenever we open fire - we've got to get our hits through at all costs’.

What would happen if he starts shooting as soon as possible? Eventually Tourville will be able to return fire. And he can play the blowing up unused pods game a hell of a lot longer than D’Orville can.

Think about it: ‘The range between the opposing forces had fallen to just a shade over 84,000,000 kilometers […] which meant he'd (Tourville) been in their effective range for over two minutes.’

When Home Fleet finally fired they did so with 22k in each salvo with 65 seconds intervals. So basically he can throw about 44k missiles before Tourville can return fire two minutes later.
Flight time will be over 8 minutes at that range, Tourvilles birds will take a couple of seconds longer.

That’s 7 salvos with 150k missiles before Tourvilles fire arrives and takes out most of his remaining deployed pods fairly quickly.

Standard Sovereign of Space SD(P)s without rotating channels (which D’Orville didn’t know about) can control 350 missiles each or 84k total and can roll 6 pods with 10 missiles every 12 secs.
If we give them a 72 sec fire interval (what Giscard did at Solon) 240 SD(P) roll pods 6 times between salvos which gives them a total of 6x6x10x240 = 86000 missiles.

How many salvos can Tourville launch before Mantie fire reaches them? As established above, he can open fire 2+ minutes after D’Orville. Flight time of the Mantie missiles is more than 8 minutes at that range, so he has about 6 minutes for launch before D’Orvilles missiles reach him. 6 minutes should result in 5 salvos or 430.000 missiles total.

So at maximum range Home Fleet fires 150k and Second Fleet fires 430k before they hit each other and take out most of the predeployed Manticoran missiles pods.

Compare this to what actually happens.
Home Fleet fires 150k. Tourville settles for less than possible and fires 524k. Flight time is 7.5 minutes or 450 seconds

Now for the fun part.

With the 72 seconds interval from Solon Tourville fires 6 salvos in 450 seconds.
As established above he can throw 86k missiles if he rolls pods like Giscard did at Solon.
6 salvos with 86k missiles is 516k missiles.

Without Donkey. Let that sink in. WITHOUT DONKEY.

Tourville can launch almost as many missiles (8k less than with Donkey) if he launches like Giscard did at Solon.

This Is another HUGE inconsistency IMO.
Turns out, Dinkey is NOT necessary AT ALL to get to a 500k missiles launch.

This means D’Orville should have expected such a large salvo from 2nd. Nothing about the volume of fire is impossible, its exactly what Honor run into at Solon.

Did I mention I hate AAC? Makes good reading, but only if you don’t think about whats happening.

Anyway, our 500k+ launch with AND without Donkey is about 18% more missiles than the amount D’Orville would have received had he opened up at maximum range before his missiles would have reached Tourville.

So this means, D’Orville was willing to eat 18% more missiles for maximum effectiveness of his missiles.

I don’t know about you, but I think its at least possible that this tradeoff works in his favor.

Even more so if you consider that Tourville will throw much more missiles on far fewer units anyway.

Like D’Orville says, they’ll get buried anyway, 400k or 500k missiles makes no real difference. Only thing he can do is to make sure he hits Tourville as hard as possible.

Anyway, the real question now is, why the f*k was donkey necessary if a Sovereign SD(P) can roll 360 missiles anyway for each salvo, maxing out the control links??
Tourville cant fire more missiles quicker with maxed out control links and he didn’t. His 500k launch is exactly what Giscard did at Solon without Donkey.

AAC just keeps on giving

The bigger issue is how did it happen that Home fleet didn't have a single recon drone? Not just deployed, which they should have had some cruising outside the hyper limit given that they have at least 600 and can trivially service and reuse them, but not a single one was launched to see what the attacking fleet was doing. Were they all taken away to be gold plated as part of the Queen's birthday celebration?

Yeah good question.
Maybe the ones which got too close got intercepted by the LACs.

Check out this when they deployed the Donkeys:
"Their pods are almost as stealthy as ours are, and the recon platforms wouldn't be able to see them at this range . But those are superdreadnoughts. They'd have to have an awful lot of tractors to be able to tow so many pods they'd have to tow them outside their wedges."

shouldn't a discussion of postOB ship construction include Bolthole????

justdave wrote:shouldn't a discussion of postOB ship construction include Bolthole????

The original post was regarding the new Manticore Yards

justdave wrote:shouldn't a discussion of postOB ship construction include Bolthole????

That's actually a totally different discussion, which has already been answered.

Bolthole has many ships in various stages of construction - all standard Havenite designs, either all or mostly SDs and CLACs. As the RMN and Havenite research teams develop RMN hardware upgrades for the RHN vessels, they will be installed in the vessels which are at the appropriate stage of construction to accept the "high tech" system. First will be KHII firecontrol and the ability to use fusion Apollo pods, and on from there. An "alliance" type SD and CLAC will probably be designed in 1-2 years with the best tech and ideas from both navies, but it will take some time to spin up the RHN team on the new hardware and build the tools to construct it properly.

In the middle of this process, the technology and training will percolate out to the other Havenite yards and update their construction as well, allowing for updated, more capable lighter ships and missiles. AS before, this initially be will be modifications on designs currently under construction and installed in the appropriate stage of construction. In addition, the updates will probably include tech updates for existing ship, allowing bolt on upgrades during maintenance and refits for existing ships.

Meanwhile, the new RMN yards will start with some RMN design with RMN designed hardware when they become available. The question is what design is the best - namely something "easily" built, like a DD/CL design, something highly usable, like a LAC or CA, or something with long lead time with strategic importance, like a SD or CLAC?

Star Knight wrote:That’s 7 salvos with 150k missiles before Tourvilles fire arrives and takes out most of his remaining deployed pods fairly quickly.

No. RMN pods are attached to the hull and hence inside the sidewalks and radiation shields and hence immune to the mystical "proximity kill" mechanism.

So Home blows up all the pods the RHN deploys and does some damage, while the return fire does much less damage (as RHN missiles are terrible way out) and has no effect on the RMN pods. I don't see how this can possibly end in a worse outcome.

kzt wrote:No. RMN pods are attached to the hull and hence inside the sidewalks and radiation shields and hence immune to the mystical "proximity kill" mechanism.

yes but:

'Home Fleet's Fire Plan Avalanche called for the pre-pod superdreadnoughts to deploy their pods as quickly as possible. They had to jettison them anyway, in order to clear their own defensive systems, and D'Orville had known from the beginning that he was going to lose a huge percentage of their total pod loads without ever actually firing their missiles. '

kzt wrote:So Home blows up all the pods the RHN deploys and does some damage, while the return fire does much less damage (as RHN missiles are terrible way out) and has no effect on the RMN pods. I don't see how this can possibly end in a worse outcome.

The RMN losses all predeployed pods from the SDs when the RHN savlos arrive.
The RMN can only blow up deployed pods. Since RHN SD(P)s would be rolling pods, at best they can reduce savlo densities after the 500k launch.
Thats rather immaterial, Home Fleet will be long gone before Tourville losses enough pods for it to matter.

Think about it this way:
2nd Fleet fires 500k missiles against 42 SD(P) and 48 SD. Thats more than 5500 missiles for each ship.
Home Fleet fires 150k missiles against 240 SD(P).
Thats 625 missiles for each ship, Tourvilles fires close to nine times as many missiles as D'Orville.
It gets much worse if he concentrates the fire entirely the SD(P)s.

I dont care how good or bad RHN missiles are at maximum powered ranges. With that kind of numbers Tourville just buries Home Fleet. Destroying pods just wont matter, both sides blow each other to pieces, whether the RMN launches at maximum range or 2.5 minutes later.
Thats what we a re talking about. Just to make it clear. Home Fleet had an effective range of 90 Mill km, Tourville had 85 Mill km.
He was always going to bury D'Orville, the slight range advantage of Home Fleet wouldnt have changed anything.

Therefore D'Orville chose effectiveness over quantity. He knew would lose Home Fleet within minutes anyway, rather than speculating on one or two more salvos he went for maximum effect with fewer missiles.
Since we dont know how much more effective his missiles became with the (slightly!) reduced range we can criticize him for not launching sooner.

In the end, it would not have mattered anyway.

They never get to deploy that many pods, as they get blown up soon after they are deployed, so they are instead going to go to continuous fire instead of giant salvos. That the whole point.

Edit, now that I'm off my phone:
The RMN can also do things like drop complete salvos behind them as they close. As the entire point of harassing fire is to make the enemies life hard, the fact that these will be less accurate really doesn't matter. But they will be far away from where the RHN will be targeting.