Battle of Spindle

cthia wrote:

tlb wrote:




What cheat?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Deploying a squadron of "mere" Saganami C heavy cruisers along with one geriatric DN to defend Spindle while covertly deploying a freighter full of Apollo pods is sneaky.

Not warning Adm Crandal that the Mark 23 missile is designed to ream Haven SDs which have far better missilr defenses and tougher armor than SLN SDs is decrptive.

Not warning Crandal that even without Keyhole 2 to provide FTL fire control, the Apollo control missiles effectively multiply the number of FC control channels by a factor of 8, and Saggy Cs have far more control channels than they ought to, is just plain diabolical.

Not warning Crandal that all of those recon drones provide FTL sensor readings effectively reduce the control time lag by 50% is just evil.

What FLY said!

I missed this post! Actually, tlb, I was simply joking. Of course Henke didn't do anything wrong, except remove her gloves. She pulled a dirty Mike. . . Tyson. You can't bite someone's ear off or remove your gloves in the middle of a boxing match. LOL . . .

"Trust me, Cindy. If that is the way she's thinking, she's in for a rude awakening. I'd really prefer to stall, as I said, in the hope the Admiralty's managed to expedite our reinforcements and they come over the alpha wall in the proverbial nick of time. I'm not going to hold my breath counting on that, though, and I'm not going to delay a single minute if it looks like they mean to keep right on coming. Which brings me to the fourth thing I want to be certain we accomplish."

She paused, and silence hovered for a second or two until Oversteegen broke it.

"And that fourth thing would be what, Milady?" he asked.

"The instant any Solly warship crosses the Spindle hyper limit inbound," Michelle Henke said flatly, "the gloves come off. There won't be any preliminary surrender demands this time, and despite whatever Admiral Crandall may be thinking, we're not going to be thinking in terms of a fighting retreat, either. I think it's about time we find out just how accurate our assumptions about Battle Fleet's combat capability really are."

Pardon my bold.


Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall was described as a fat-assed woman with a fat-assed task force. Mike simply put her on the SlimFast plan -- known galaxy-wide as the die-yet.

Somehow the RMN came across as a bunch of piss ants, knowing full well they are dreaded fire ants.

"The Solarian League can't accept something like this—not out of some frigging little pissant navy out beyond the Verge—not matter what kind of provocation they may think they have! If we let them get away with this, God only knows who's going to try something stupid next!"

—Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall, SLN

I know textev says the two opponents were pretty evenly matched without the pods if Henke had fought smartly. Though I wonder exactly how her approach would have changed if her cavalry of pods had not arrived, JIT.

cthia wrote:[...]

I know textev says the two opponents were pretty evenly matched without the pods if Henke had fought smartly. Though I wonder exactly how her approach would have changed if her cavalry of pods had not arrived, JIT.

MoH, Ch. 20 wrote:In many ways, he [That is, Terekhov - my add] supposed, Oversteegen’s Nikes might have been a better choice than his own heavy cruisers, given that the Nike was equipped with Keyhole, and the Saganami-C wasn’t. In fact, before the ammunition ships Aetna and Vesuvius had arrived with their massive loads of Apollo pods, the Nikes would have been in orbit around Flax while the Saganami-Cs played the part of the beaters coming along behind the quarry.

Eagleeye wrote:

cthia wrote:[...]

I know textev says the two opponents were pretty evenly matched without the pods if Henke had fought smartly. Though I wonder exactly how her approach would have changed if her cavalry of pods had not arrived, JIT.

There's textev im MoH*, that, in this case, Admiral Henke would've awaited the Sollies with her Nikes in Orbit, while Terekhov would play the hunter ... which would make sense, because the NIKEs have 5,000 missiles each - even it it were only Mk16 - instead of the 1,200(?), the Sag-C could store in their magazines.

*Here's the quote, from Chapter 20, MOH, page 267 1st HC-edition

MoH, Ch. 20 wrote:In many ways, he [That is, Terekhov - my add] supposed, Oversteegen’s Nikes might have been a better choice than his own heavy cruisers, given that the Nike was equipped with Keyhole, and the Saganami-C wasn’t. In fact, before the ammunition ships Aetna and Vesuvius had arrived with their massive loads of Apollo pods, the Nikes would have been in orbit around Flax while the Saganami-Cs played the part of the beaters coming along behind the quarry.

- bold printing by me


True, the SAG-Cs would probably carry the day nonetheless, because I'm under the impression that all Mk-16-capable vessels had the Mod-G Variant in their magazines - but Henke couldn't know that. So she would have used the bigger magazines of her battlecruisers to make sure the Sollies would've gotten their hands full.

Ch. 18 MoH wrote:And if they hit Mike without Blaine and before the ammunition ships get there, what are her chances?" Elizabeth asked quietly.

"From what I've seen of the tech readouts from their battlecruisers' databases," Caparelli replied for the earl after a moment, "and assuming the count on Crandall's SDs is accurate and Admiral Gold Peak fights as smart as she's always fought before, I'd say her chances range from about even to fairly good. There's no way she could survive in energy range of that many superdreadnoughts—I don't care what class they are—but I very seriously doubt that any Solarian superdreadnought's going to survive to close to energy range. Their missile armaments are light, even by our pre-pod standards, and from our examination of the battlecruisers' counter-missiles and those 'Halo' decoy platforms of theirs, they still don't have a clue what the new missile threat environment really is. For that matter, assuming the stats we've pulled out of the computers are really accurate—which, to be honest, in some instances I find a little difficult to believe—at least two thirds of their reserve fleet's still equipped with autocannon point defense, not lasers."

"You're joking," Langtry said, his expression eloquent of disbelief.

"No, I'm not." Caparelli shook his head for added emphasis. "As I say, it's hard to believe, but that's what the data says. In fact, it looks to Pat's analysts as if they've only just recently really started to become aware of the increased missile threat. From the reports we've had from Second Congo, at least someone in the League's been experimenting with extended-range shipkillers, but whatever Mesa may've told Luft and his lunatics, there's no evidence the one doing the experimenting is the SLN. They're upgrading their current-generation anti-ship missiles, but only marginally, and according to our captured data from Byng, the improvements are to seekers and EW capabilities, not range.

"Defensively, there's some information in the data about something called 'Aegis,' which is supposed to be a major advance in missile defense. As nearly as we can tell, though, what it really amounts to is ripping out a couple of broadside energy mounts, replacing them with additional counter missile fire control and telemetry links, and then using main missile tubes to launch additional canisters of counter-missiles. It's going to thicken their counter-missile fire, but only at the expense of taking several shipkiller missiles out of an already light broadside. And to make things worse from their perspective, their counter-missiles themselves aren't as good as ours; the fire control software we've been looking at was several generations out of date, by our standards, at the start of the last war with Haven; and even on the ships where they've converted the autocannon to laser clusters, they don't appear to have increased the number of point defense stations appreciably."

He shook his head again, his eyes bleak with satisfaction.

"I don't doubt that they've increased their anti-missile capability from what it used to be, Tony," he said. "And it's going to take more missiles to kill their ships than it would have before they did it. But the end result's going to be the same, and if Admiral Gold Peak doesn't have Apollo, she's got at least four missile colliers stuffed full of Mark 23 flatpacks, her shipboard magazines are full of Mark 16s, mostly with the new laserheads, and every one of her Nikes has Keyhole One. Trust me. If this Solly admiral's stupid enough to ram her head into Spindle, Admiral Gold Peak will give her the mother of all migraines. She may not be able to keep Crandall from taking control of the planet's orbitals if she's willing to suck up the losses involved, but she'll be damned lucky if she has ten percent of her ships left when Tenth Fleet runs out of ammo."

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

Given the difficulty that the Hexapuma had taking on Battlecruisers at Monica, I don't think that Saggy Cs could be hunting SDs at Spindle without at least Mk-23 pods to supplement Mk-16 G.

SftS, Chapter 30, page 406, 1. HC-ed wrote:With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

tlb wrote:

Fox2! wrote:It's up to SLN ONI to provide a proper appreciation of the capabilities of any potential opponent. Mike (and the RMN/GA) have no responsibility to demonstrate the power of the Mk 23 missile system, whether controlled by SD(P)s or "mere" CAs.

They did demonstrate the power of the missile system, but the SLN ONI after action report declared that it was system defense pods tractored to the CAs that produced the damage. Even that should have given them pause: if a cruiser could tow missile pods that could destroyer a SD from long range, then the SLN was already screwed. But they waved their hands and said that the Yawata Strike must have flushed all the defense pods around the Manticore system, so Adm. Filetra should have no problem.

Madness

Eagleeye wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:

Given the difficulty that the Hexapuma had taking on Battlecruisers at Monica, I don't think that Saggy Cs could be hunting SDs at Spindle without at least Mk-23 pods to supplement Mk-16 G.

At Monica, the Hexapuma didn't have the Mod-G-variant (or even the Mod-E1) of the Mk 16. The Mod-G MK-16 is 5 times as powerful as the Mk 16, Terekhov used at Monica, the Mod E1 2 times. Here's the quote from SftS, Chapter 30:

SftS, Chapter 30, page 406, 1. HC-ed wrote:With its fifteen megaton warhead, the Mark 16 had been capable of dealing with heavy cruiser or battlecruiser armor, although punching through to the interior of a battlecruiser had pushed it almost to the limit. Now, with the new Mod G's forty megaton warhead and improved grav lensing, the Mark 16 had very nearly as much punch as an all-up capital missile from as recently as five or six T-years ago.

(bold print by me) Shortly after that quote, there's textev on the same page, that the Mod-G Laser-heads throughput "had increased by a factor of over five.", while even the Mod E-1 with the original warhead, and only increased Grav-lenses has a doubled destructiveness compared to Terekhovs missiles.

And remember "Shadow of freedom"? How surprised Zavala was, that he totally destroyed 4 Solarian BCs with only 1 salvo for each? That was the first introduction of the Mk16, Mod-G, into a battle. Believe me - they would've been more than sufficient to seriously harm the Solarian SDs. It would probably have needed 3 or 4 salvos for the same result the Mk 23 achieved with one; but it would have happened.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Given the difficulty that the Hexapuma had taking on Battlecruisers at Monica, I don't think that Saggy Cs could be hunting SDs at Spindle without at least Mk-23 pods to supplement Mk-16 G.

cthia wrote:Mike took her gloves off in this boxing match. She cheated ... Go figure. LOL