lyonheart wrote:Hi Brigade XO,
I think you're right that the SLN has had a hard time recognizing the alliance LAC's as part of the layered defense, and given Tamaguchi only saw them when they wanted to be seen, implies that less capable SLN commanders and their staffs would miss them entirely unless the alliance are so obliging.
It was some eleven years ago that I and some others at the bar wondered what missiles cost and the production rate, suggesting that producing 5-10,000 missiles per day at 5-10 M$ million each would exceed even the SKM's wealth.
His Celeryness responded by pointing out the missiles were literally dirt cheap, made from asteroids etc, with all the production equipment [nanites etc] being amortized over tens if not hundreds of millions etc, so the actual unit cost was only a million or two, even for an Apollo eventually.
It then implies that CM's are proportionally less, perhaps in the M$ 100-200,000 range; so the 'Barricade' missiles were far more efficient than CM's not less, which required 432 CM's to kill just 58 [the worst RMN CM performance ever], or almost 7.5 for each kill, so the 'Barricade' missiles were more than 180 times as effective, ie perhaps 18+ more times cost effective.
Was it Honor or Mike who was thinking about how clever Scotty and Horace had been?
It will still take a time to pass the tactic along.
Best belated Christmas wishes to all, and a happy new year!
LBrigade XO wrote:The SLN also has the difficulty of probably not seeing the LACs being used in the CM role and are making some estimates based on seeing CMs showing up well outside- and intercepting- SLN missles- along with the earlier information on probable RMN CM capabilities . Remember, the current generation RMN LACs are very difficult to track for SLN and while they still do need to stay out of the fireing solutions profiles for the anti-ship missles on both sides, they are going to be launching CMs into that volume of space.
The SLN might be thinking that RMN and RHN have what appear to be at least limited ultra-long range CM capability when what is actualy happening is a layed defence using those stealthy LACs as antimissile platforms.
Remember, nobody or essentialy nobody who was engaged and survived on the SLN side in the recent battles has gotten back to tell what they saw and although Manticore has released some sensor logs, they aren't going to be providing all the interesting tiny details like custers of CMs appearing way out in front of the RMN/RHN ships to start picking of SLN missiles. Someone is going to have to either say something like the intercepts tracks looked odd or note and correlate CM groups that seem to come in from the side or steep angle "in-front" of SLN missile volleys.
If you can't see the impeller track of some missle with something like a CM canister, you might guess that these things were being launched as part of a regular RMN anti-ship volley into the flight path of the SLN weapons and included a significant ballistic component before dispursing the CMs with seeker heads. Makes a much sense as invisable LACs being sent out on balisitic courses where they could be inside the intercept profile of the SLN missles. These are crazy neo-barbs, they could send LACs on Forlorn Hope missions such as gliding up the incomming attack vector to shoot at the SLN missles and pray none of the attack missiles locked up on something so small.
Note that even at Spindle, there were about 20,000 missiles fired, which let's just say (to make my math easier) would be about 20 billion dollars.
In return, they got probably 100 ships captured. As I recall from early books, they pay a bonus for them. That could well be larger than the cost of missiles.
Even at the Second Battle of Manticore, the cost were very large but these kinds of battles are pretty rare. And in that case it was the survival of the nation at stake.
The US, which represents a fairly small percentage of the earth's population, spends about a half billion or so on its military. A three (later four) planet nation could spend more.