Intelligence Failures After Zanzibar

saber964 wrote:I can argue it. It's because if Sphinx fires it missiles from the ground then the planet its self becomes a legitimate military target.

The orbital defenses are targets no matter what. What else do you call a handful of forts and clouds of missile pods? Eventually they are going to be engaged by Tourville if he wants to take Sphinx.

And no one builds Forts and deploys trillions of Manticorian dollars worth of missile pods for them just to be handed over without a fight when the first enemy shows up. Tourville has to engage them at some point. Why not use their fire control to snipe at the opponent 2 times, not just when he comes to confront them directly.

That's why I mentioned firing their pods AFTER Tourville had passed Sphinx in the resonance zone and was out of his missile range. Manticore would have the advantage of using long ballistic phases aided by targeting updated by FTL drones. Many would miss, but Tourville was heavily damaged by home fleet and would continue to take damage from large salvos, even if it wasn't definitive. Yes he could fire back, but Tourville has to worry about EE violations, because shotgunning MDMs from 75-100,000,000 KM at a planet's defenses and hitting the planet while knowing that some missiles would hit the planet IS the definition of an EE violation since you DO NOT CONTROL THE ORBITALS before you launched the attack on the planet.

And after the Forts expend their pods, they have hours to rearm from the supplies and ammo ships in the Manty system, before Tourville can cross the resonance zone, hyper out and return - that is if he has not taken sufficient damage and declares the attack over.

As I posted back in May, Tourville expended 55% of his missile loadout on Home Fleet, and expended most of the rest on 2nd fleet. While 2nd fleet was getting ripped up would have been a perfect time to coordinate fire from Sphinx.

http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7976&p=223345&hilit=+sovereign#p223345

The frustrating thing about that awful book is that everything that was needed could have been easily accomplished without beating us over the head with the plot club.

Now if only Star Knight or someone can give me an online peek inside of Chapter 3.

What strategic blunders before Lovat?

cthia wrote:Now if only Star Knight or someone can give me an online peek inside of Chapter 3.

What strategic blunders before Lovat?

Well kzt has his donkeys at Zanzibar, this is the bone i choose to pick.

If you remember, the attack on Lovat (Operation Sanskrit) was initially planned as an follow on to Cutworm III and direct answer to Operation Gobi (Second Battle of Zanzibar).
The original planned was sound but due to Tereokovs action at Monica and the resumption of peace talks the operation was delayed for a couple of tmonths.
After the peace talks fell through, the crown directed the RMN to resume hostilities and at this point the Admiralty dropped the ball completely.
The scene in AAC is quite bizarre to be honest. Chapter Fifty-Two if you want to read it.
They have a cabinet meeting, Elizabeth wants to go to war again and destroy peep wallers and White Haven just offers her Sanskrit again.
I dont know if this is entirely on him or the entire Admiralty house sitting on their asses for a couple of tmonths, but they completely fail to recognize and act on the changed overall strategic position.
Sanskrit as an immediate successor to Cutworm III would have made sense, it would have kept the Peeps further off balance.
Sanskrit as an attack to resume hostilities a couple of tmonths later doesn't achieve anything except to show Apollo to the other side.
If they had two working brains between whatever they have going on in the White Haven Admiralty they would have recognized that:
Apollo either works as a game changer or it doesnt
If it doesnt, we are screwed, no matter if we find out at Lovat or a couple of months down the road. Haven will win the war no matter what they do.
If Apollo works, we have won the war, no matter how many wallers Haven builds until we are ready. All we have to do is to hold out until we have enough Apollo missiles deployed (remember Buttercup??!!)
Consequently there is nothing gained and much risked by showing Haven Apollo before its deployed in sufficient numbers. If we really need to go for broke, instead of screwing around at Lovat we can hit Haven itself one or two tmonths down the road and end the war one way or the other.

As far as we can tell, they never even bothered to think about all this. They were deadset on Sanskrit, and isnt it nice that Honor has so many more new shiny stuff know?
Their only concern was to get Eighth Fleet back in time to function as a strategic reserve in case Haven would do something which was supposed to be unimaginable anyway.

So what did happen? Personally i blame White Haven. It was not his job to come up with operational plans and sell them to the Queen in the first place. He's First Lord, not First Space Lord. Remember how things worked during the First War? The First Space Lord - Caparelli, then and now - was responsible for the operational planning. Operation Buttercup and the entire prelude to it was his brainchild, not Mourncreeks. He just got her permission (and that of the Crown) when it came to executing it.
So where was Caparelli during the operational planning of Cutworm and Sanskrit? You tell me. The operations were effectively planned by Eighth Fleets chief of staff and if necessary Eighth Fleets CO went directly to the First Lord which happened to be her husband.

And just look at their resumes. Put them together with Elizabeth and you dont need to wonder why every strategic thought they come up with starts and ends with 'Attack NOW'.

Anyway, i talked about this before:
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6617&start=20#p175725