Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

Jonathan_S wrote:
But short term I suspect the Grand Alliance unified SD(P)s are initially going to go primarily to Beowulf and Haven; Beowulf because they don't have any SD(P)s and Haven because they're providing the bulk of the construction and because their SD(P)s are markedly inferior to what Manticore, Grayson, and the Andermani already have in service. Rolling out post-war improved classes to those three seems lower priority.

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[1] Also it's marginally possible that Grayson might have so many excess keyhole equipped SD(P)s that they'd prefer to sell some off to Alliance members rather than create an overlarge reserve. The Grayson and Manticoran naval tech is effectively the same, so Manticore shouldn't have significant problems maintaining any Grayson customized and build units. But that depends on how large a peacetime naval budget Benjamin and the Keys are willing to shoulder long term - and whether Manticore has too few Keyhole units to fill out their desired capital ship forces.

If I remember correctly, post BoM the Manticore Alliance had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 260 SD(P)'s in service which I would assume the majoiroty being in the IAN since they had ships being refit and in home space while three alliance fleets were sucked into the BoM losing 30-40% of the Alliances SD(P)'s. Even with mad dash to finish construction between BoM and OB there wouldn't have been 100+ constructions complete in terms of SD(P)'s.

Between the start of the war in November/December 1919 and January 1920 till OB there are roughly 24 months. How many ships could they have started building from scratch in the first 6 months?

Sigs wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:
But short term I suspect the Grand Alliance unified SD(P)s are initially going to go primarily to Beowulf and Haven; Beowulf because they don't have any SD(P)s and Haven because they're providing the bulk of the construction and because their SD(P)s are markedly inferior to what Manticore, Grayson, and the Andermani already have in service. Rolling out post-war improved classes to those three seems lower priority.

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[1] Also it's marginally possible that Grayson might have so many excess keyhole equipped SD(P)s that they'd prefer to sell some off to Alliance members rather than create an overlarge reserve. The Grayson and Manticoran naval tech is effectively the same, so Manticore shouldn't have significant problems maintaining any Grayson customized and build units. But that depends on how large a peacetime naval budget Benjamin and the Keys are willing to shoulder long term - and whether Manticore has too few Keyhole units to fill out their desired capital ship forces.

If I remember correctly, post BoM the Manticore Alliance had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 260 SD(P)'s in service which I would assume the majoiroty being in the IAN since they had ships being refit and in home space while three alliance fleets were sucked into the BoM losing 30-40% of the Alliances SD(P)'s. Even with mad dash to finish construction between BoM and OB there wouldn't have been 100+ constructions complete in terms of SD(P)'s.

Between the start of the war in November/December 1919 and January 1920 till OB there are roughly 24 months. How many ships could they have started building from scratch in the first 6 months?

That is the big question. David called it the "Python Lump" because most of the RMN construction started at once. The "guessed" number was at least 200 SD(p)s, because this is the number Manticore had under construction at one time in the first war. But it could be higher. Also, 35 more ships could have been laid in the vacated slips of the completed first war construction in early 1920. Regardless, the Python lump is all Invictus, all KHII armed, and completely finished and lsunched prior to Oyster Bay. Asduming a lump of 200, a refilling of the 1st war delayed construction, and 43-47 surviving SD(p)s by my calculations, Manticore has ~280 SD(p)s at the end of UH.

Grayson had a build rate of 2.5 ships per month during the 2nD war all the way up to OB, with 35-40 BoMA losses. Another 25 or so ships should have been added to the 165 ships reported in HoS giving 145-150 active SD(p)s surviving OB. Unfortunately, Grayson lost ~ 60 hulls under construction in OB, anywhere from just laid down to almost complete.

The Andermani only laid down 120 SD(p)s, and only 40 were complete when the war started, and 40 were focused on to complete with KHII just before and after BoMA, with the last 40 completed well after BoMA, probably after OB, with probably ~10 losses of the early built Adler's at BoMA and Zanzibar.

Haven had literally 100s of SD(P)s under construction at once. Pretty much all the 332 SD(p)s used at BoMa came from Bolthole, as did the ~40 left guarding the Republic. David said once that 6-700 more ships were laid down in the dozen or so conventional yards around the republic, which would complete in the next year after BoMA, and a 2nd round of ships was already under construction at Bolthole, completing in later.

So Haven probably has a force of 7-800 SD(p)s, with another 3-400 completing over the next 18 months.

At the end of UH, the GA probably has at least a strength of 1150-1250 SD(p)s, another 600 SDs in reserve, plus 300 or so Bolt hole specials completing over the next 18 months.

Sigs wrote:I don't know the government will forbit the TQ and Silesia from building shipyards and improving their local industries to support those yards, I think the issue is that the SKM/SEM will not fund the expansion of yards in TQ and Silesia until the industry in the Manticore HS is back up and running.

I didn't mean forbid. I said that the yards can't build a ship they don't have blueprints for and if the RMN won't give them the blueprints, they can't build them. There can be any number of reasons why the RMN doesn't want those plans getting out of the MBS and Bolthole, for maybe purely security reasons. You don't want them falling on the wrong hands.

TQ and Silesia need to know their market before spending the capital to build and modernise those yards. You don't want to be left with a white elephant after sinking a significant portion of the system's or the region's GDP into it. (we have no idea how much it costs, maybe it's cheap)

Sigs wrote:

Not that the RoH is likely to part with those designs, since it has plenty of shipyards of its own that will be competing for that market. The TQ shipyards had better form a consortium with some design bureaus in the Manticore Binary System and start producing those. They can be knock-offs of RHN designs and older Shrikes.

There will be a lot of systems needing ships over the decade or two after the end of the war with the League, a few yards in Talbott and a few yards in Silesia will not bankrupt the Republic and will actually strengthen the GA, it might be a little improvement but it will be an improvement.

Sure, I just meant that as a capitalistic venture, you don't want your competitors too close to you. Let the SEM industries come up with their own export designs.

Sigs wrote:

That's where the shoals of system defence missile pods come in. A surprise attack with anything less than two squadrons of state-of-the-art SD(P) is unlikely to succeed. And besides, why would anyone attack the smaller systems first?

Noone but the GA has state of the art SD(P)'s as of yet but the MA has SD(P) under construction. Five or ten years down the line there might be more nations with SD(P)'s so just because your fixed defences might be enough in 1923 doesent mean you have to ignore mobile capital ships until something bites you in the ass and forces you to build them because it might prove too late.

You're completely right, but I think you missed my point. Maybe we're even agreeing with each other. I didn't mean to ignore threats as they become known and as resources become available to address them.

I meant that in the short- and medium-term, shoals of defence pods suffice against anything but squadrons of modern SD(P)s, which as you've noted no one but your allies has. So it will take years for someone to come up with the SD(P)s to threaten any system in the alliance, even the smallest one.

What do you think happens to the SEM if someone comes in with sufficient forces to wipe away any fixed and mobile assets in 90% of the SEM and the RMN cannot respond? What do you think happens to the SEM's word and promise of assistance to other systems if they cannot or are unwilling to protect their own territory except for a small core group of systems. If I had a fleet of 50 SD(P)'s and I wanted to make the SEM suffer I would crush every bit of military and civilian piece of equipment in orbit and in fact I would make every one of the systems that the SEM deemed unworthy of protection surrender, at which point nothing the SEM says or does will be taken seriously by any verge, shell or core world since they will know that the SEM cannot protect itself so how can it protect them.

I don't think you could do what you're saying, not even with 50 SD(P)s.

As technology is currently understood, it's a matter of surface area and ECM. When you have 12-15 thousand capital grade missiles coming at you in a single wave at over 0.6c, you need to be able to fire, what, 40 to 120 thousand counter missiles? An Invictus has 84 CM per broadside, 24 fore and 14 aft. Assuming all could be brought to bear, that's 206 CM per ship. Assuming you have time for two launches, you still need 100 Invictus-equivalent to fire 40 thousand counter-missiles. Four Nikes are equivalent to an Invictus in the CM department and it takes give Saganami-C to match an Invictus, so you could do with 40 Invictus, 80 Nike and 200 Saganami-C for the same math. Techniques like Barricade can lower the number, but tactical skills can only offset so much the math.

And my other point is that those ships will not come unscathed. You're going to lose some or many and you're attacking a minor system. And that's if you don't lose all of them: a system with a 2 million missiles can fire 133 waves of 15k missiles at you. With a kill rate of 0.5 SD per wave, there would still be 33 waves to deal with the BCs and CAs, with half the invader's CMs and PDs gone (the more you lose, the more you lose).

And I limited the size of the wave based on the Battle of Spindle, when the defence was organised by a squadron of CAs that didn't want to annihilate the enemy. If you had BCs, SDs or Mycroft, you could control larger waves, saturating the defenders and increasing your kill ratio. Remember, Haven lost 200 SD(P) (not including surrendered ones) attacking Manticore, which wasn't defended by Apollo yet. And there's nothing stopping you from launching 120k blindly like Győző did at Hypatia.

Who the hell has the economy to build and squander that much? Building a single SD will bankrupt 90% of the nations. It takes a Core World-sized economy to build, arm, crew and maintain 50 SD(P). It takes a large multi-system economy (or collective insanity) to throw 50 SD(P)s away.

The SLN might have opted to this strategy, at the height of their arrogance. Anyone else, including the MA, will not.

No, it requires a different strategy, something to change the game, which can be based on a technical advantage like the Spider Drive.

Sigs wrote:And in the mean time the 50 SD(P)'s will gut the other 15 systems in Talbott. And with someone who is close technologically 50 SD(P)'s can easily deal with 12 SD(P)'s even with a lot of pods, afterall anyone who has paid any attention to the war between the RMN and the SLN knows that they will need a lot of PD and they will have their own CLAC's and their own versions of the Katana on hand. The attacker might lose some ships but it wont be 40 ships to the RMN's 12.

Ok, so let's say 50 SD(P)s and 25 CLACs deploying 4000 LACs. How big a missile wave powered by Apollo is that capable of holding back? We don't really know because no such battle has been fought.

The closest we know is the Battle of Solon, when Honor had 2 SD(P)s, 6 CLACs / 670 LACs and 5 BC(P). With 3 waves of 11k-12k missiles, HMS Intolerant was seriously damaged. And those were RHN missiles, with nowhere close to Apollo accuracy or Manticoran ECM. Or, for that matter, how they compare to a Mark 40 4-drive system missile.

So maybe 50 SD(P)s and 4000 LACs can overcome 2 million Mk23 or Mk40. In the first invasion, you'll have lost quite a chunk of your LACs and a few of your SDs. You won't survive the second and, by the time you extricate yourself, your force is gutted and combat-ineffective.

If I remember correctly, in one of the books it was described that with SD(P)'s it was becoming more expensive to arm an SD(P) then to build one. The RMN in 1923 is significantly smaller ship wise and manpower wise then the RMN in 1905 but with exponentially more responsibilities.

Another good reason not to send a couple million counter-missiles and tens of thousands of capital ones into oblivion attacking a minor system. That's a significant fraction of your GDP even for a Core World.

Any multi-system polity that even builds 50 SD(P)s will be the target of ONI infiltration by all major powers of the Alliance. To free up 50 to go attack Talbott, you must have at least 200 more covering your home systems. And if suddenly 20% of your force disappears, the GA will take notice. All this will achieve is a visit by the Reunified Grand Fleet with, by your own calculations, 800+ SD(P)s, repeating Operation Nemesis.

You'd need a Darius or Bolthole to build such a fleet in secret. And you need a Core World-sized economy completely in secret (like Darius) to finance it, otherwise Cachat, Zilwicki or Ruth Winton will be able to tell something's up.

Any FF ships that make it into local hands and moonlight as pirates will likely be pissing off their neighbours as well. Most of the corporations from the League will lose their investments when the local corrupt government is deposed anyway and with the loss of the intervention battalions and the loss of the threat of SLN intervention alot of governments will quickly change.

Sure, but at that point those neighbours will be asking for GA protection. A division of Rolands can deal with anything up to and including BC SLN ships. I just meant that the GA won't be actively stamping down every system that acquires SLN surplus, even if illegitimately obtained.

Theemile wrote:
That is the big question. David called it the "Python Lump" because most of the RMN construction started at once. The "guessed" number was at least 200 SD(p)s, because this is the number Manticore had under construction at one time in the first war.

That is if you counted Grendelsbane which wouldn't be a factor in the second war.

But it could be higher. Also, 35 more ships could have been laid in the vacated slips of the completed first war construction in early 1920. Regardless, the Python lump is all Invictus, all KHII armed, and completely finished and lsunched prior to Oyster Bay. Asduming a lump of 200, a refilling of the 1st war delayed construction, and 43-47 surviving SD(p)s by my calculations, Manticore has ~280 SD(p)s at the end of UH.

Where are those ships though? During the war the RMN deployed 40 in Second BoM, as well as ~60 in Beowulf. I would guess 30 in Trevors Star no matter how I look at it the RMN deployed no more then 180 SD(P)'s during the war with the League and That is heavily assumed that they participated heavily in Beowulf and still had ships deployed in Trevor's Star, Alizon, Zanzibat plus the 2 Squadrons in Talbott. If we were talking about 280 SD(P)'s the there would have been more ships deployed to Talbott since they weren't deployed anywhere else.

I mean at 280 SD(P)'s we know that Home Fleet had 40 SD(P)'s, 60 in 3rd Fleet in Beowulf and 12 in Talbott. That's 112 SD(P)'s which would mean that we would need another 168 SD(P)'s deployed to Trevor's Star, Zanzibar and Alizon.

Grayson had a build rate of 2.5 ships per month during the 2nD war all the way up to OB, with 35-40 BoMA losses. Another 25 or so ships should have been added to the 165 ships reported in HoS giving 145-150 active SD(p)s surviving OB. Unfortunately, Grayson lost ~ 60 hulls under construction in OB, anywhere from just laid down to almost complete.

Grayson also had continued building and stockpiling materials during the peace negotiations so they could continueally lay down ships, Manticore on the other hand had not so I find it hard to believe that they would be able to lay down 128 SD(P)'s all at once to be done within 2 years of laying down starting with no stockpiles of resources and I assume slips full of civilian ships. Post BoM the RMN was left with probably 60 SD(P)'s unless they were buying the excess SD(P)'s that the GSN was building but unable to man.

Haven had literally 100s of SD(P)s under construction at once. Pretty much all the 332 SD(p)s used at BoMa came from Bolthole, as did the ~40 left guarding the Republic. David said once that 6-700 more ships were laid down in the dozen or so conventional yards around the republic, which would complete in the next year after BoMA, and a 2nd round of ships was already under construction at Bolthole, completing in later.

Yeah but in the books it also said that they had been stockpiling supplies for those ships in Bolthole for a decade. It wasn't a cold start where in 1915 they started building SD(P)'s from scratch, they had a sizable stockpile of equipment. If they had been producing the materials needed for those SD(P)'s before laying them down I can see it, but they had to most likely start from nearly scratch to get those ships ready.

So Haven probably has a force of 7-800 SD(p)s, with another 3-400 completing over the next 18 months.

In the book they have roughly 700 SD(P)'s left over assuming all of those captured in BoM are too damaged to be returned. With probably another 800 under construction.

Ok, so let's say 50 SD(P)s and 25 CLACs deploying 4000 LACs. How big a missile wave powered by Apollo is that capable of holding back? We don't really know because no such battle has been fought.

The closest we know is the Battle of Solon, when Honor had 2 SD(P)s, 6 CLACs / 670 LACs and 5 BC(P).[/quote]

Sorry for the brainfreeze, there's a better battle to extrapolate from: RMN Third Fleet versus RHN Fifth Fleet during the Battle of Manticore. Kuzak had 55 SD(P)s and 10 CLACs, defended by Katanas, but lost 30 SDs. The wiki doesn't say how many missiles Adm Chin fired and in how many waves. And those were RHN missiles. But this indicates you can saturate RMN-level defences with RHN-level missiles.

An better extrapolation might be the Battle of Lovat, which had RMN Apollo missiles against RHN SD(P)s. After all, no one has RMN-level technology except the GA, so no one is going to have 50 SD(P)s equipped with RMN-level ECM, CMs and PDLs in the next decade. In 3-5 years, other powers may have 1919 RHN-level technology. At Lovat, 2600 Apollo-controlled missiles overwhelmed Giscard's defence and destroyed two SD(P)s. The wiki doesn't say how many ships he had, aside from "a wall of battle" and "a division of CLAC". Let's say that was only one SD(P) squadron, 8 ships.

Scaling the missiles up by 5x (13000) and the attacking fleet by 10x (80 SD(P)s and 20 CLACs), we have a roughly the numbers of the previous post. If the outcomes also scale linearly, that's 1 SD(P) kill per wave. The SD(P)s are depleted after 80 of the 133 waves, which is better than I had calculated. That leaves 53 to deal with the CLACs, BCs and CAs.

And one other aspect I've thought of: against system defenders, the missiles may come from different vectors. So you can't even roll ship to defend against them: at best, you have your wedge against one angle and the sidewalls against the other. All it takes is a stealthed defending CL to move while the attackers are accelerating in-system to control the links of the second angle for a time-on-target strike.

Apollo-powered 4DMs may even do that on their own and use their super-extended range to just form large parabolic arcs of attack. They'll do huge damage even without a Mycroft FTL control link.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The wiki doesn't say how many ships he had, aside from "a wall of battle" and "a division of CLAC". Let's say that was only one SD(P) squadron, 8 ships.

Each group had 16 SD(P)s and 4 CLACs, with roughly 800 LACs aboard them. And Apollo went through their defensive fire with about 60% effectiveness - of 1900 laser heads launched, 1200 got through.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:How do you attack someone in a grav wave? Aside from kzt's idea of just translating downwards, I don't even see how you could get close enough for energy weapons. Any ship in a grav wave has sails, that's both attackers and defenders. Wouldn't they be moving at the same speed and acceleration?

In other words, are ships moving in a grav wave simply a train: they enter together and they leave together, in the same order?

Hmm... ok, a grav-wave is not one-dimensionsal and we know it's possible to tack the wave, moving against its direction. By angling your sails to go left and right, up and down, you can also increase the distance you're travelling and delay your motion so you get closer to anyone coming up behind you or come at them from another vector.

But then attacking someone in a grav wave would be extremely risky, unless you're sure of superiority. If suddenly your prey reveals to have more than what you could bite, you're screwed, since then you can't escape. You can't break off, since every fastest path available to you is also available to the other side, including crash translation. Minimising this risk by coming in on a very a different vector also means your window to attack is also short and could allow even wounded prey to escape.

Or can some ships be faster than others, by having bigger sails or some other technological mechanism?

Unless that exists, I only see battles at transitions: when coming out of a grav wave. Just like WH forts, ships will usually come out of a grav wave one by one, with enough separation to avoid collisions, and opposite force can arrange itself in a hemisphere around the emergence point, thereby maximising angles of attack. And missiles, wedges and sidewalls work again, while the emerging ship is transitioning from sail to wedge. Unlike a WH transit, the ships behind the first can scan ahead and the one being attacked can transmit back. In case of an attack, the ships behind would change course and emerge elsewhere.

The one time we saw it happen it was warships running down an escorted convoy. The merchies slowed the convoy to a top speed of 0.5c and probably an 80% accel of around 1,520 gees. But the attacking heavy cruisers top out at 0.6c in hyper and can pull an 80% accel of 3877.5 gees! ("a ship under Warshawski sail can pull almost ten times the acceleration it could under impeller drive" [SVW])

But DDs still have higher acceleration and SDs lower in a grave wave. It usually doesn't matter because it takes just a couple hours to max out at their shared top speed of 0.6c - but the wave uniformly multiplies their base accelerations; so a ship that's quicker in normal space is still proportionately quicker while under sail.




It was having to defend the relatively slow convoy is what let the attackers catch up and fight in the grav wave. And while crash translation into n-space wasn't discussed in the book it was 6 Peep CAs against 2 RMN CLs + 3 DDs. I'm confident that if the convoy had crashed out of hyper the Peeps would have crushed the convoy escorts (despite the RMN's edge in missile combat) and the vastly improved sensor range would have likely let them run down most of the freighters/transports. (Which was basically what Theisman wanted to do in the rift between waves - though that still has the inferior sensor range of hyper)

So the escorts' best chance to protect the convoy was to fight it out within the wave were the advantages of the larger ships were reduced and every Peep they crippled took another out of of the fight to tow the cripple to safety. And it worked. For the compete sacrifice of all the escorts the convoy itself successfully scattered and evaded destruction.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The wiki doesn't say how many ships he had, aside from "a wall of battle" and "a division of CLAC". Let's say that was only one SD(P) squadron, 8 ships.

Each group had 16 SD(P)s and 4 CLACs, with roughly 800 LACs aboard them. And Apollo went through their defensive fire with about 60% effectiveness - of 1900 laser heads launched, 1200 got through.

Thanks for the numbers. That's double of what I had estimated, which means that a 5x increase will get to the 80 SD(P)s and 20 CLACs, matching the 5x increase in missile density to 13000. We know that a handful of Saganami-C CAs can drive that density, though not with Keyhole II.

So if we say 13000 missiles takes out 2 SD(P)s out of 80, 20 waves (520k missiles) has more than halved the attacking force. From that point on, each wave takes 4 SD(P)s, so I'll just round it to 30 waves total to destroy all the SD(P)s and whatever escort force there was.

Half a million missiles, their pods, positioning, maintenance, plus early warning sensor net and picket force are not cheap by any means, but well within the SEM and Alliance means. They have a couple of years to get there too.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Thanks for the numbers. That's double of what I had estimated, which means that a 5x increase will get to the 80 SD(P)s and 20 CLACs, matching the 5x increase in missile density to 13000. We know that a handful of Saganami-C CAs can drive that density, though not with Keyhole II.

So if we say 13000 missiles takes out 2 SD(P)s out of 80, 20 waves (520k missiles) has more than halved the attacking force. From that point on, each wave takes 4 SD(P)s, so I'll just round it to 30 waves total to destroy all the SD(P)s and whatever escort force there was.

Half a million missiles, their pods, positioning, maintenance, plus early warning sensor net and picket force are not cheap by any means, but well within the SEM and Alliance means. They have a couple of years to get there too.

The efficiency of each launch goes up with the number of missiles you can throw, so long as you have the fire control to use them properly. The percentage of missiles stopped by those defenses is a combination of a fixed number (the number of missiles you can shoot down) and a percentage of the attacking missiles (the percentage of missiles your ECM can confuse or misdirect). The advantage of Apollo is to get that second number down to just about zero when used by a Keyhole II ship, and much lower than it would be otherwise when used autonomously after light speed control (as in the Spindle launch you referenced).

The effect is that the bigger your launch is, the higher percentage of missiles will get through. In the case of the Lovat ambush, increasing the number of missiles per launch would have increased the percentage of missiles which got through, since the number of missiles the Havenites could shoot down was fixed. That is, they would have only been able to shoot down 700 regardless of whether 1900 or 3800 had been launched at them. Doubling the number launched would have resulted in 80% getting through rather than 60%.

That would not necessarily be true of a launch controlled by light speed links, since ECM of the target becomes an issue. But the fixed number would remain the same, so doubling that launch might only see an increase from 60% to 70% rather than the 80% FTL control would get through.

How this relates to your post: if you have the fire control capability, ten launches of 26000 missiles are better than twenty launches of 13000. You'd be taking out 5 or 6 SDs per launch rather than 2. It also means there's a greater chance each destroyed SD would only be hulked and not detonated, meaning you'd have more survivors in the attacking force. The same effects with potentially fewer dead people is always nice.

We also have an extreme example of a launch going the other way - the fixed number able to be shot down being very low, but the percentage of missiles defeated by ECM being very high. That would be Hypatia.

Galactic Sapper wrote:The efficiency of each launch goes up with the number of missiles you can throw, so long as you have the fire control to use them properly. The percentage of missiles stopped by those defenses is a combination of a fixed number (the number of missiles you can shoot down) and a percentage of the attacking missiles (the percentage of missiles your ECM can confuse or misdirect). The advantage of Apollo is to get that second number down to just about zero when used by a Keyhole II ship, and much lower than it would be otherwise when used autonomously after light speed control (as in the Spindle launch you referenced).

The effect is that the bigger your launch is, the higher percentage of missiles will get through. In the case of the Lovat ambush, increasing the number of missiles per launch would have increased the percentage of missiles which got through, since the number of missiles the Havenites could shoot down was fixed. That is, they would have only been able to shoot down 700 regardless of whether 1900 or 3800 had been launched at them. Doubling the number launched would have resulted in 80% getting through rather than 60%.

That would not necessarily be true of a launch controlled by light speed links, since ECM of the target becomes an issue. But the fixed number would remain the same, so doubling that launch might only see an increase from 60% to 70% rather than the 80% FTL control would get through.

How this relates to your post: if you have the fire control capability, ten launches of 26000 missiles are better than twenty launches of 13000. You'd be taking out 5 or 6 SDs per launch rather than 2. It also means there's a greater chance each destroyed SD would only be hulked and not detonated, meaning you'd have more survivors in the attacking force. The same effects with potentially fewer dead people is always nice.

We also have an extreme example of a launch going the other way - the fixed number able to be shot down being very low, but the percentage of missiles defeated by ECM being very high. That would be Hypatia.

Thank you, what you say is true. Especially the part about Hypatia: right now and for the next couple of years, no one except the Alliance has the kind of ECM to defeat Alliance missiles. We can speculate what the MA has, but without battle experience I'd doubt they approach pre-Alliance RHN levels. The only two sources of sensor data that the SLN acquired of RMN tech was at Hypatia and at Ganymede. In the latter case, the GF was probably able to scrub the data from anyone in sensor range; in the former, the performance of the missiles was slightly down to match the Mk14 that the Saganami-B were firing.

And we know from Spindle that 12000 missiles can destroy and mission kill 23 SDs in a squadron of 70. That number is not going to repeat because now everyone knows that such performance exists and they wouldn't be at the posture that Crandall had when attacking.

That's why I was focusing on 12-15k missiles: we know that a handful of Saganami-C can control that many Apollo. The premise of the discussion was that someone could throw 50 SD(P)s and 20 CLACs at minor Talbott systems to make the RMN scramble and disperse its forces and to inflict psychological tension between the member planets and Manticore. I was arguing that with a handful of picket ships and a shoal of Apollo missile pods in each system (Mycroft optional, but welcome) is able to effectively defend them against any conceivable threat that anyone in known space is able to throw at them.

Except threats of unknown nature. You can't fire at what you can't see. So a squadron of Leonard Detweiler spider-driven SDs firing spider-driven torpedoes can destroy the pods and picket ships before they could lock on and fire.

That actually begs the question: how did the MA "mistletoe" the Mycrofts at Beowulf? We know that Honor was able to use Mistletoe at Lovat because they had forced the RHN to activate them in their feints before. There had been no feints before activation and I'm sure that the defending forces would have been aware of that tactic (always reposition after firing, like any good infantryman).