BC(C) (Spoiler Within)

So, how long have the last 5 fleet battles taken? Where is the proper place for LACs to be in a fleet battle? How long will it take for them to return from that point to main body of the fleet and then move back on-station, assuming it takes no time to re-arm?

Does this make ANY sense? How far down the priority queue should this be?

kzt wrote:So, how long have the last 5 fleet battles taken? Where is the proper place for LACs to be in a fleet battle? How long will it take for them to return from that point to main body of the fleet and then move back on-station, assuming it takes no time to re-arm?

Does this make ANY sense? How far down the priority queue should this be?

Excellent point, but LAC operations are probably going to be critical for fighting against extremely stealthy ships. LACs will be, or (IMHO) should be, used as a screen for any significant group of warships, and heavily used for patrolling at wormholes and captured star systems.

In the end, while LACs are not truly comparable to airplanes, they do have a whole lot of functional similarities. Eventually, the CLAC will likely replace the SD(P) in space battles like aircraft carriers replaced the battleships as the dominant fighting ships on Earth's oceans in WW2.

It doesn't take a SD(P) to launch a ton of missile pods. A freighter can do that. A dedicated BC or even a smaller ship can provide telemetry and guidance (Moriarty). The only thing that an SD(P) can do that other ships can't, is survive massive amounts of damage or fight at knife's edge with other SD's.

SD's and even SD(P)'s may be becoming more of a liability than an asset in the long term. We'll have to see how things progress in upcoming books.

kzt wrote:So, how long have the last 5 fleet battles taken? Where is the proper place for LACs to be in a fleet battle? How long will it take for them to return from that point to main body of the fleet and then move back on-station, assuming it takes no time to re-arm?

Does this make ANY sense? How far down the priority queue should this be?

The doctrine of deep LAC strikes, and "one sortie, one engagement" died almost before then-Rear Admiral Truman finished training the Minotaur as the LAC concept testbed.

EoH, Ch 18 wrote:Training operations were almost always harder—well, aside from the adrenaline rush, the terror, and the dying—than real attack missions. Which only made sense. In actual combat operations, you would almost always carry out only a single attack per launch—assuming that everything went right and you actually found the enemy at all.

Between EoH and even by first BoMa, Manticore still kept it's carriers well away from the real battles, excepting Kuzak's Third Fleet in BoMa, and ammunition is definitely a thing to worry about. In AAC, Battle of Gaston

Each Katana fired twenty-five Vipers. The six Dagger squadrons between them put eighteen hundred of them into space over a thirty-second window

math works out to there being 72 Katana's to fire that many missiles with that quantity from each, and that's an incredibly fast launch rate.

AAC, Battle of Chantilly wrote:magazine space as the Manty missile LACs we were able to inspect after Thunderbolt, and that these things are basically the same size as their standard counter-missiles, that has to be at least fifty percent of their total loadout, Ma'am. Possibly as high as sixty, if they've committed additional volume and mass to more point defense clusters, as well."

We don't actually know how long Commander Dillinger's Dagger squadrons were actually firing, but based on the fire-rate from Gaston we can guess a Katana has no more than 2 minutes worth of ammo at maximum firing rates.

Then there's Solon, which had the same Katana quantity as Gaston and Chantilly. Honor's carriers translated out just before Giscard dropped in. And her LACs were with the podnoughts and screen. Without looking the battle up, they were a good hour or two inside the hyper limit by the time Moriarty actually fired, and her LACs had been defending from Giscard's missiles.


With a combat reloader, Moriarty's effectiveness would have been slashed another good deal, because the LACs that should have been providing substantial anti-missile defenses were already down to 50% (or more) of their CMs simply because they had to defend against what they thought was the primary threat (Giscard) and didn't know Moriarty existed, let alone that what they actually got hit by was 1/4 of what Moriarty can actually handle.


First BoMa would have been another example, although more-so for the Havenites than Manticore, especially since their LAC's (and even their carriers) are defensive in nature, and so should be docking for in-action rearming.

Effective LAC tactical deployment in a fleet action is multiple millions of km in front of the main line of battle, where they can separately fire at the incoming missile stream. So how one does it take to fly back to your carrier for a zero-zero intercept and then turn around and fly back out to be on station?

Run it assuming the fleet is stationary and that the fleet is accerating at say 80% military power of the SD(P)s. how long a battle do yo need to have to make this a realistic possibility?

Oh, and since we have already seen that LACS can mysteriously stealthily accelerate at fleet speed towing 100x their mass, maybe it would be effective to give them more ammo in the form say 100,000 tons of vipers each?

kzt wrote:Effective LAC tactical deployment in a fleet action is multiple millions of km in front of the main line of battle, where they can separately fire at the incoming missile stream. So how one does it take to fly back to your carrier for a zero-zero intercept and then turn around and fly back out to be on station?

Run it assuming the fleet is stationary and that the fleet is accerating at say 80% military power of the SD(P)s. how long a battle do yo need to have to make this a realistic possibility?

Basing off the information from Battle of Chantilly Henke's 2 or 3 divisions were 2.5 million kilometers behind Oversteegen where the Katana's originally were. After an unknown period of acceleration they were 10 minutes from a near zero/zero escort position.

So, off the cuff, and without Jonathon's nifty spreadsheets, those Katana's in Chantilly were going to have done a 2.5 million kilometer trip in about 20 minutes, 30 at the outmost to do a zero/zero intercept from a missile defense position, to ready to close in for dock. 9 minutes or so for the unrep, and 30 minutes to get back into position while another squadron is already waiting to dock up, and a third squadron is just pulling back as the first is accelerating back into position.


Speed would really depend on whether this notional unrep ship would be capable of docking more than the minimum one squadron for missile resupply at once, the time to go from the escort position to docking is almost negligible considering the time even MDM's take at maximum powered range shots without ballistic segments.

So from the point where the LACs start shooting CMs, how long have the last 5 or so fleet actions taken to the point where the battle is over?

Lets assume the LACs are stationed a half million km past Mk31 CM range, so 4 million km from the main body and that the replenishment ship is parked in the main body.

Also, for simplicity I'm just going to use the stated 80% accelerations from House of Steel, rather than trying to adjust (based on the most recent books) for the acceleration improvements since these ships were designed.

With the ships at rest scenario just the pure acceleration at 508.4 gees it's going to take basically 30 minutes each way (896.01 seconds to turnover). And that ignores turnover time, docking, reload, and launching times - it's pure transit time.
All for a couple of minute of CM fire before they go 'Winchester' again.

If we assume the LACs and main body are moving on a parallel course accelerating at 450.1 gees (Invictus SD(P) 80% accel) it get worse. To make intercept the LAC has to angle to about 62 degrees, instead of a straight perpendicular return. That makes their closing acceleration vector just 236.4 gees (I think, it's been too long since I dealt with multiple acceleration vectors). That would make it take 44 minutes each way!


Forward deployed LACs appear, to me, to only make sense in 2 scenarios.
1) Single shot to blunt a pod-heavy alpha strike. They deplete their ammo and are effectively out of the rest of the combat (except for whatever their PDLCs can contribute), or have the fall back to rearm in case there's a second ambush an hour later.

2) Minimal sustained force. Rotate, say, 4 fresh LACs per carrier out to the 4 million km engage point every 3-6 minutes so you have a conveyor belt of units rotating from the CLAC/resupply ship to the defensive point and back. But then you only get 1/28th the CMs available to defend against each wave

[Edit: And I'd point out that you'd have more flexibility for the first hour and a half if you just surged all 112 LACs out to 4 million km and then tried to engage missiles selectively. Under any scheme the initial LACs take 30 minutes to get on station, and then it would take an hour to rotate them back and forth. And if you had all the LACs there you have the option to stop playing the slow attrition game and flush CMs if circumstances dictated - plus even while having LAC's hold CM fire that'd be a bunch more PDLCs on station]

(I'm assuming it's impractical to hide the resupply ship out there with the LACs - it'd get spotted and shot to shit no later than the moment anybody realized what it was doing there)

kzt wrote:So from the point where the LACs start shooting CMs, how long have the last 5 or so fleet actions taken to the point where the battle is over?

Well the only recent one that was a 'fair fight' was BoM and when you stack that many podlayers in one spot the defenses still seem to get overwhelmed.

It took Tourville and Chin's 2nd and 5th fleets almost 10 minutes to shred Kuzak's 3rd fleet. (Though the CM engagement time would have been about 7 minutes of that. Why the close held Katana's might have had 4 whole minutes to dock and reload after shooting themselves dry.


That said, in combat with less crazy numbers of modern SD(P)s, they do seem to be bullet sponges look at how many long range SD(P)s Honor's meager forces at Solon managed to run dry in their attempt to defeat her. On at max roll rate an SD(P) can shoot itself dry in under 20 minutes - so against any single set of SD(P)s high intensity combat will last only so long - being able to reload LACs seems mostly to help if you manage to catch the enemy dispersed and can defeat him in detail (or escape past multiple dispersed enemies) -- rearm your LACs after fighting each separate force...

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:So from the point where the LACs start shooting CMs, how long have the last 5 or so fleet actions taken to the point where the battle is over?

Well the only recent one that was a 'fair fight' was BoM and when you stack that many podlayers in one spot the defenses still seem to get overwhelmed.

It took Tourville and Chin's 2nd and 5th fleets almost 10 minutes to shred Kuzak's 3rd fleet. (Though the CM engagement time would have been about 7 minutes of that. Why the close held Katana's might have had 4 whole minutes to dock and reload after shooting themselves dry.

So instead the logical fix seems to be to put out LACS with deeper magazines rather than trying to reload them really fast so they are almost ready just in time to die when the carrier blows up. Like they could each tow say 2 million tons of pods full of CMs (based on this recent book I seem to recall)?

kzt wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:Well the only recent one that was a 'fair fight' was BoM and when you stack that many podlayers in one spot the defenses still seem to get overwhelmed.

It took Tourville and Chin's 2nd and 5th fleets almost 10 minutes to shred Kuzak's 3rd fleet. (Though the CM engagement time would have been about 7 minutes of that. Why the close held Katana's might have had 4 whole minutes to dock and reload after shooting themselves dry.

So instead the logical fix seems to be to put out LACS with deeper magazines rather than trying to reload them really fast so they are almost ready just in time to die when the carrier blows up. Like they could each tow say 2 million tons of pods full of CMs (based on this recent book I seem to recall)?

Put a ghost rider drive into a missile pod, and you don't need a LAC or a SD(P) to launch them.

Or, more conventionally, LACs don't need to go back to the fleet to resupply, just rendezvous with incoming replacement pods.