Battle of Spindle

MoH Ch. 22 wrote:The Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser massed four hundred and eighty thousand tons. It mounted forty missile launchers in each broadside, and it had been designed to fire double broadsides at its enemies, then provided with a sixty percent redundancy in control links as a reserve against battle damage. That gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

The twelve ships of Cruiser Squadron 94 and Cruiser Division 96.1 fired just over fifteen hundred missile pods at Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy.

* * *

"Estimate twelve thousand—repeat, twelve thousand—incoming!"

Sandra Crandall's head snapped around at Ou-yang Zhing-wei's hard, flat announcement. She stared at her ops officer, eyes huge, too shocked by the numbers to register even disbelief. At that, she was doing better than Pépé Bautista. Her chief of staff's expression was that of someone infuriated by a lie rather than someone stupefied by astonishment.

Pardon my bold.

A couple of things. Michelle wanted to test the effectiveness of the SLN systems as she stated. But I always thought that twelve thousand missiles as a first volley didn't exactly accomplish that. Why such a huge first volley? Wouldn't a much smaller volley have resulted in much better intel of SLN systems? And possibly even saved some missiles?

Second. Why is firing off-bore so difficult? If I didn't already know better, I'd think it'd be a common ability from the very beginning of missile combat.

cthia wrote: Why is firing off-bore so difficult? If I didn't already know better, I'd think it'd be a common ability from the very beginning of missile combat.

This is just my guess. The firing bore actively imparts velocity to the missile by means of a mass driver. It was reported that the reason the old pods were less effective is that they lacked any mass driver, so those missiles were slower that the ship launched ones. Now off-bore firing requires scrubbing the initial velocity to fly in a completely different direction. Therefore until you had more powerful wedges or multi-drives on the missiles, they would lack the velocity that made them so hard to intercept when they reached the target.

kzt wrote: It’s a fake problem that only existed as long as it was narratively useful.

The power of plot compels you! The power of plot compels you! The power of plot compels you!

Agreed, as when some brash young commander used an entire salvo of Mk 23s as a broom to sweep clean a salvo of Sollie missiles.

Fox2! wrote:Agreed, as when some brash young commander used an entire salvo of Mk 23s as a broom to sweep clean a salvo of Sollie missiles.

To be fair, the SLN missiles were in a ballistic phase when any wedge could have destroyed them and the salvo of missiles were aimed at the SLN ships, so the RMN accomplished a two for the price of one piece of economy.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote: Why is firing off-bore so difficult? If I didn't already know better, I'd think it'd be a common ability from the very beginning of missile combat.

This is just my guess. The firing bore actively imparts velocity to the missile by means of a mass driver. It was reported that the reason the old pods were less effective is that they lacked any mass driver, so those missiles were slower that the ship launched ones. Now off-bore firing requires scrubbing the initial velocity to fly in a completely different direction. Therefore until you had more powerful wedges or multi-drives on the missiles, they would lack the velocity that made them so hard to intercept when they reached the target.

Thanks. IINM, I also recall there being an issue of not being able to "see" through the wedge or around the ship or something? Which I don't understand. If one side of your ship can see, then it would seem to be a small matter of feeding the targeting data into the off-bore firing side.

tlb wrote:

Fox2! wrote:Agreed, as when some brash young commander used an entire salvo of Mk 23s as a broom to sweep clean a salvo of Sollie missiles.

To be fair, the SLN missiles were in a ballistic phase when any wedge could have destroyed them and the salvo of missiles were aimed at the SLN ships, so the RMN accomplished a two for the price of one piece of economy.

Ach, I had forgotten that. Clean out the enemy's mess, then go make a mess out of the enemy. Very efficient.

tlb wrote:To be fair, the SLN missiles were in a ballistic phase when any wedge could have destroyed them and the salvo of missiles were aimed at the SLN ships, so the RMN accomplished a two for the price of one piece of economy.

Except the geometry doesn't work. It's another magic solution. Not to mention that this scene has a pair of LACS each towing two million tons of pods at 700g while maintaining stealth. "It's a miracle!"

tlb wrote:To be fair, the SLN missiles were in a ballistic phase when any wedge could have destroyed them and the salvo of missiles were aimed at the SLN ships, so the RMN accomplished a two for the price of one piece of economy.

kzt wrote:Except the geometry doesn't work. It's another magic solution.

Please explain how the geometry does not work. Naively I would expect that the track for a missile going from the SLN to the RMN ship, could also be used as the track of a missile going from the RMN to the SLN ship. By using the reciprocal course the RMN missile wedge kills the SLN missile, since the RMN missile can be powered the entire distance (unlike that of the SLN).

Michelle is looking at a massive amout of ships and weapons to be heading at Spindle. If Crandall crosses that hyperlimit about the only thing to do is kill or render combat-ineffective as many SNL ships as possible before they get withing powered flight envelope of Spindle.
In other words, kill as many as possbile and beat the living hell out of the rest till they surrender or are "gone".

Remember that Henke is very aware -she has recordings and demands etc plus experience- about what the standard attitude of the SLN is about nobarbs in general and Manticore in particular. Crandall is comming to teach Manticore a lesson and put them in their place.

Henke also has all that intelegence sifted our of Byng's ships and a fair idea of what Crandall's capasities and capabilities are and a certain read on her attitude which seems to be go do the SLN thing and crush you opponant with volume of ships and weapons.
Ok, so the 800lb gorilla is going to do the intimidation thing including close at best profile with all that metal and smash you out of the way. Henke is going to stay out of range and obilterate targests, 1st in a massive targeted wave and then keep ripping at them in a closing bag (from outside of the SLN engagement ranges) as they drive for Spindal.

OH PLEASE, diven into the ambush and keep openeing more and more of your flanks to weapons that can gut SDs from more than twice the range you can engage me with. That wouldn't have quite gotten to be a rapidly vaporizing clot of SLN SDs which were essentialy englobed by smaller ships that were outranging and out firing them by the time it got close enough to Spindal to be a problem. When you think about this scenario Crandall is about to dive into a situation where RMN weapons that lose lock because their targets have been destroyed are quite likely to just acquire another SLN target not in it's queue and happily continue on to target. Also known as "target rich environment".

cthia wrote:

MoH Ch. 22 wrote:The Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser massed four hundred and eighty thousand tons. It mounted forty missile launchers in each broadside, and it had been designed to fire double broadsides at its enemies, then provided with a sixty percent redundancy in control links as a reserve against battle damage. That gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

The twelve ships of Cruiser Squadron 94 and Cruiser Division 96.1 fired just over fifteen hundred missile pods at Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy.

* * *

"Estimate twelve thousand—repeat, twelve thousand—incoming!"

Sandra Crandall's head snapped around at Ou-yang Zhing-wei's hard, flat announcement. She stared at her ops officer, eyes huge, too shocked by the numbers to register even disbelief. At that, she was doing better than Pépé Bautista. Her chief of staff's expression was that of someone infuriated by a lie rather than someone stupefied by astonishment.

Pardon my bold.

A couple of things. Michelle wanted to test the effectiveness of the SLN systems as she stated. But I always thought that twelve thousand missiles as a first volley didn't exactly accomplish that. Why such a huge first volley? Wouldn't a much smaller volley have resulted in much better intel of SLN systems? And possibly even saved some missiles?

Before the battle, it wasn't thought to be that much of an overkill, really. IIRC, they targeted 24 SDs with that salvo, so only ~500 per target. I'm sure they also believed the SLN had better wallers than Haven did, despite any data to the contrary.

Whilst it was a heavy blow, I'm not sure it was overkill by much. Several of the targeted Solarian SDs "survived" as wrecked hulks, requiring search and rescue efforts.