Stupid Apollo Tricks

I'm still amazed at the level of internal consistency that has been maintained. There are things that jerks like me might argue about, but it's really amazing.

I remember a project on the old Laurel K. Hamilton list to work out how the world worked, and pretty soon we all agreed there was no there there. It was all plot determined and varied by what was convenient for that book. There was nothing off-screen, and when the larger world got involved how it worked also varied by the plot needs of the current book. This was by book 4 or 5, years before she ditched her husband to go live the dream and figured out how to get rich writing bad internet porn.

Back to "Stupid Apollo Tricks":

Take one large freighter/ammo ship filled with Four-drive System Defense Apollo pods and one medium freighter with two Mycroft control centers and several RDs.

Stop several light-hours outside of the target system and dump the entire load of Apollo pods and temporarily offload one Mycroft.

Launch every missile in a burn two stages and coast mode. Reload the Mycroft and head in-system with the small freighter. Leave the large freighter to recover the pods.

At a believable "astrogation error" long distance from the Hyper limit, dump the Mycroft modules on ballistic courses under stealth one near the hyper limit to regain control of the missile swarm and use the third drives to correct the courses to converge on the target.

Continue into the system with the small freighter and launch the stealthy RDs to provide up-dated intel to the second Mycroft. Then simulate a breakdown and go silent with the freighter or continue in to the target on some mundane excuse -- a la "a message for the CEO of Kalakainos."

If everything is timed right, the Mycroft will drift into a prime position to control the attack, the RDs will have scouted the target for current targeting info, and the missiles will reach a point-blank range in their second ballistic phase.

Activate the fourth drives in sprint mode and a large freighter load of missiles suddenly appear at point blank range and destroy orbital infrastructure, fleets "at anchor," Ships arriving or departing, moon bases or whatever needs to be destroyed.

The small freighter picks up the Mycrofts on the way out of the system (as she flees in panic from her narrow escape.)

Weird Harold wrote:Back to "Stupid Apollo Tricks":

Take one large freighter/ammo ship filled with Four-drive System Defense Apollo pods and one medium freighter with two Mycroft control centers and several RDs.

Stop several light-hours outside of the target system and dump the entire load of Apollo pods and temporarily offload one Mycroft.

Launch every missile in a burn two stages and coast mode. Reload the Mycroft and head in-system with the small freighter. Leave the large freighter to recover the pods.

At a believable "astrogation error" long distance from the Hyper limit, dump the Mycroft modules on ballistic courses under stealth one near the hyper limit to regain control of the missile swarm and use the third drives to correct the courses to converge on the target.

Continue into the system with the small freighter and launch the stealthy RDs to provide up-dated intel to the second Mycroft. Then simulate a breakdown and go silent with the freighter or continue in to the target on some mundane excuse -- a la "a message for the CEO of Kalakainos."

If everything is timed right, the Mycroft will drift into a prime position to control the attack, the RDs will have scouted the target for current targeting info, and the missiles will reach a point-blank range in their second ballistic phase.

Activate the fourth drives in sprint mode and a large freighter load of missiles suddenly appear at point blank range and destroy orbital infrastructure, fleets "at anchor," Ships arriving or departing, moon bases or whatever needs to be destroyed.

The small freighter picks up the Mycrofts on the way out of the system (as she flees in panic from her narrow escape.)

Given how Mycrofts are described, as fire control relays, I'm not sure that's sufficient to pull off this trick.

IIRC refitting with even Keyhole II required a plug be inserted at the forward end of the pod bay containing tons of additional fire control computers to handle the FTL links on their Keyhole IIs. I suspect that the Mycroft node lacks those computers, that it's an unmanned FTL repeater for fire control links, but it only extends the signal reach of the manned fort(s) that contain(s) those tons of additional fire control circuitry. You might be able to bring the Mycroft along in a freighter, but if I'm right you still need the offboard fire control for them to repeat/relay...

IIRC, you have to be behind the missiles to communicate to them. And they will likely detect all the FTL traffic and localize it to you.

Weird Harold wrote:Back to "Stupid Apollo Tricks":

Take one large freighter/ammo ship filled with Four-drive System Defense Apollo pods and one medium freighter with two Mycroft control centers and several RDs.

Stop several light-hours outside of the target system and dump the entire load of Apollo pods and temporarily offload one Mycroft.

Launch every missile in a burn two stages and coast mode. Reload the Mycroft and head in-system with the small freighter. Leave the large freighter to recover the pods.

At a believable "astrogation error" long distance from the Hyper limit, dump the Mycroft modules on ballistic courses under stealth one near the hyper limit to regain control of the missile swarm and use the third drives to correct the courses to converge on the target.

Continue into the system with the small freighter and launch the stealthy RDs to provide up-dated intel to the second Mycroft. Then simulate a breakdown and go silent with the freighter or continue in to the target on some mundane excuse -- a la "a message for the CEO of Kalakainos."

If everything is timed right, the Mycroft will drift into a prime position to control the attack, the RDs will have scouted the target for current targeting info, and the missiles will reach a point-blank range in their second ballistic phase.

Activate the fourth drives in sprint mode and a large freighter load of missiles suddenly appear at point blank range and destroy orbital infrastructure, fleets "at anchor," Ships arriving or departing, moon bases or whatever needs to be destroyed.

The small freighter picks up the Mycrofts on the way out of the system (as she flees in panic from her narrow escape.)

I like it! I'd like to see it tried. Damn thing might just work. It's so foolhardy that it might just work. What's his name? The one that had a high-security clearance with Apollo because he was a specialist? Was it Wanderman? Whoever, get him on it!

Perhaps this shouldn't be in "Stupid" Apollo Tricks.

Jonathan_S wrote:Given how Mycrofts are described, as fire control relays, I'm not sure that's sufficient to pull off this trick.

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Thirty-three wrote:Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

Mycroft is a Keyhole II + everything from ship-board that supports it. Since it is inspired by Moriarty it probably has a SD's Tactical Department and appropriate life support aboard as well.

kzt wrote:IIRC, you have to be behind the missiles to communicate to them. And they will likely detect all the FTL traffic and localize it to you.

Being behind the missiles shouldn't be a problem; you just have to wait for them to pass you. As for localizing FTL transmissions, nobody seems to have been terribly successful at localizing RDs' FTL comms, why should they be more successful at localizing something that they don't know is there to start with? By the time the closer Mycroft starts transmitting there wouldn't be enough time to do anything about it even if they did localize on the FTL pulses.

The coup de grâce is the incredibly stupid trick of restocking missile supply on the fly.

Backdrop: Two cowboys, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid are stuck in a gunfight. Butch turns to the "dead shot" Sundance kid...

"I'm down to my last bullet."

The Sundance kid tosses him a clip.

A fat, big and dumb navy that comes in all fat, big and dumb can afford a ship that's shot dry, Honor's ship for example, to be rearmed from afar by sending her a stacked salvo of Apollo missiles on a ballistic profile to be reacquired and retargeted by her (whose own payload is empty) to the now much closer enemy targets.

At any course, those babies are sure going to be coming in real hot — so there shouldn't be any actual back logs in [INVENTORY] from [STOCKING]

cthia wrote:The coup de grâce is the incredibly stupid trick of restocking missile supply on the fly.

Backdrop: Two cowboys, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid are stuck in a gunfight. Butch turns to the "dead shot" Sundance kid...

"I'm down to my last bullet."

The Sundance kid tosses him a clip.

A fat, big and dumb navy that comes in all fat, big and dumb can afford a ship that's shot dry, Honor's ship for example, to be rearmed from afar by sending her a stacked salvo of Apollo missiles on a ballistic profile to be reacquired and retargeted by her (whose own payload is empty) to the now much closer enemy targets.

At any course, those babies are sure going to be coming in real hot — so there shouldn't be any actual back logs in [INVENTORY] from [STOCKING]

That'd be one way to deal with the BC(P) ammo problem (assuming IRRC and their pods are Apollo capable). If you could get the timing and the angles right, it'd also be a nasty way to get missiles coming in from an unexpected vector.

On the other hand, needing to be in a certain volume to pick up incoming reloads could make for some difficult positioning restraints. Especially if the enemy knew you were trying to pull the trick.

Weird Harold wrote:Back to "Stupid Apollo Tricks":

Take one large freighter/ammo ship filled with Four-drive System Defense Apollo pods and one medium freighter with two Mycroft control centers and several RDs.

Stop several light-hours outside of the target system and dump the entire load of Apollo pods and temporarily offload one Mycroft.

Launch every missile in a burn two stages and coast mode. Reload the Mycroft and head in-system with the small freighter. Leave the large freighter to recover the pods.

1) Why burn missile stages to do what the starship drive can do?

2) This reveals 4-stage missiles for no good reason.

3) If you C-frac plus burn the missile it will be going at over 97% of lightspeed when the last stage fires. Think it's seeker will function?

noblehunter wrote:

cthia wrote:The coup de grâce is the incredibly stupid trick of restocking missile supply on the fly.

Backdrop: Two cowboys, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid are stuck in a gunfight. Butch turns to the "dead shot" Sundance kid...

"I'm down to my last bullet."

The Sundance kid tosses him a clip.

A fat, big and dumb navy that comes in all fat, big and dumb can afford a ship that's shot dry, Honor's ship for example, to be rearmed from afar by sending her a stacked salvo of Apollo missiles on a ballistic profile to be reacquired and retargeted by her (whose own payload is empty) to the now much closer enemy targets.

At any course, those babies are sure going to be coming in real hot — so there shouldn't be any actual back logs in [INVENTORY] from [STOCKING]

That'd be one way to deal with the BC(P) ammo problem (assuming IRRC and their pods are Apollo capable). If you could get the timing and the angles right, it'd also be a nasty way to get missiles coming in from an unexpected vector.

On the other hand, needing to be in a certain volume to pick up incoming reloads could make for some difficult positioning restraints. Especially if the enemy knew you were trying to pull the trick.

LOL. Never thought of that. Cool.


A fat big and dumb navy couldn't possibly ever hope to figure out what you were trying to do. Heck, you yourself may not've been aware of the possibility to even do it let alone that you were actually going to do it — until the need arises. It's called thinking on your feet. Remember, the full potential of Apollo wasn't immediately realised so probably never fully tapped. The possibility of a clueless SLN of figuring out that next logical progression of Apollo (especially having failed to fully embrace Apollo's concept and fact in the first place) is nil. Even the RHN would have fell for that one the first few times it was in the serving queue until word spread.

By the way, in basketball it's called an assist. LOL

And the timing and angle would also be provided by the big fat stupid enemy targets. Of course, it'd still require a commander to be savvy and brilliant enough to first realize the opportunity then properly take advantage of it. Know anyone like that — with a big ol' S on her chest maybe?