The big problem of late Honorverse

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:No, the RMN deliberately designed the Nike to not fight SDs. The Mk16 is a cruiser class weapon, they deliberately didn't make it capable of firing Mk23s.
typo

I beg to differ, but please note I wrote Havenite SDs, not SD(P)s. The Nikes were designed during the Janacek Admiralty before any Havenite SD(P) was ever seen in service, much less in batle. And the Mk16, despite being carried by a cruiser, is completely capable of going through SD-grade armour. There's a whole section of text during the Battle of Hypatia, as the first wave of RMN missiles arrives, where RFC explains that the Mk14 missiles were not as capable as the MK16 to go through SD armour. (but were perfectly capable of killing BCs)

A lone Nike has the standoff range and ammunition capacity to outfight and outlast any pre-pod SD. Of course, SDs aren't supposed to travel alone, which should make this engagement theoretical, but then again neither are Nikes supposed to be alone.

Not exactly. Remember the MK16 had an evolutionary process. Earlier payloads were not really heavy-hitting enough to take SDs on. That particular upgrade(the mod-G) rolled out after the Battle of Monica and brought the MK16's punch up to "capital-grade".

The difference between Hexapuma's MK16s at Monica and the Rolands' missiles at Saltash is substantial(considering their targets were Solly BCs both times). Whilst a Janacek-era Nike definitely could mission-kill an old-style SD, I don't believe it would be cutting through the armour so easily.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:[There's a whole section of text during the Battle of Hypatia, as the first wave of RMN missiles arrives, where RFC explains that the Mk14 missiles were not as capable as the MK16 to go through SD armour. (but were perfectly capable of killing BCs)

A lone Nike has the standoff range and ammunition capacity to outfight and outlast any pre-pod SD. Of course, SDs aren't supposed to travel alone, which should make this engagement theoretical, but then again neither are Nikes supposed to be alone.

That was due to warhead changes made well after the ship was designed. It’s not been mentikned how this impacted the Mk23, but I bet it did.

And yes, this is another example of David stacking the decl for the RMN.

munroburton wrote:The difference between Hexapuma's MK16s at Monica and the Rolands' missiles at Saltash is substantial(considering their targets were Solly BCs both times). Whilst a Janacek-era Nike definitely could mission-kill an old-style SD, I don't believe it would be cutting through the armour so easily.

I've referred to this as "golf-balling" a ship. Lots of surface craters but nothing that's going to threaten the core hull - until and unless you manage to wreck both impeller rings and expose the hull to direct impacts or wedge collisions.

Galactic Sapper wrote:One thing that irked me about First Manticore: no mention is ever made of the colossal tactical blunder D'Orville committed by not firing as soon as the Havenites started deploying pods, or at the very least the instant he had the range. It was known from Salon than the Havenites could control launches of that density. Even allowing for the surprising ability to throw salvos that large that frequently thanks to the Donkeys, the better tactic would have been to get early, paced fire onto the Havenite fleet. First, to force them to launch the first massive salvo from a range where they're least likely to get hits and second to prevent those ships from building up following salvos of that size. Use the or lose them on a short time scale; it's not like D'Orville didn't have ammo to burn to do it. He had to jettison thousands of pods to clear the defenses of his older ships anyway, but he could have employed those pods against the enemy rather than simply wasting them.

Home Fleet was hosed either way, but they could have taken a far larger, even crippling, percentage of Second Fleet with them. With Second Fleet crushed, Third Fleet would have fared much better against Fifth Fleet.

Though to be fair once D'Orville starts firing the Havenite fleet is likely to instantly return fire. So he's going to lose basically all his un-fired pods as soon at that first Havenite salvo lands. So either way he gets off only as many pod salvos as can be launched/controlled in the interval between 'open fire' and 'impact'. Okay, at prolonged range you can probably get one or two more off into space while the first is still in transit - but your hit percentages for all of them will be lower.

Now when your first salvo hits Haven will lose any unfired pods they've already rolled. But they're podnaughts facing your mostly legacy SDs (many of which still carry just SDMs for their internal tubes); so they can roll more and you can't. Once Home Fleet's pods are gone the rate of fire will be ludicrously in Haven's favor - you'll be lucky if you can keep heavy enough MDM fire from your few podnaughts or refitted SDs to keep Haven from deeply-stacking salvos.

Home fleet is so screwed there that I'm not actually sure how much effective they'd have been if they'd put Haven's fleet under fire early enough to prevent the massive Donkey towed alpha strike. Sure they don't die in the alpha strike, but using (or losing) your towed pods outside of truly effective range means you're not going to have done much damage to Haven's forces. And now your legacy SDs are impotent unless you can survive closing across almost 60 million km; only good for thickening your defensive fire while Haven can focus on killing the relative handful of ships that can still launch long range missiles.

It has been clearly established that the max effective range of the RMN is longer than the RHN. In addition the pH of the RMN is significantly better at long range than the RHN. And the pK is higher. So, given the lifetime supply of missiles that home fleet has, there isn't really any good reason to not start firing as soon as they cross some line such that you go to zero ammo when they reach RHN optimum range. Or some similar metric.

But you don't need to wait until they enter powered flight range, as it isn't like you are going to run out of ammo.

Oh, and maybe Home fleet might launch some of those recon drones I hear so much about.

Just to stir up the toilet, it was the BC(P)s that were designed to kill PRN SDs, not the Nike class BC. BC(P)s can be loaded with same ammo as SD(P)s.

Dilandu wrote:In Honorverse, on the contrary, Manties never actually prepared to fight SLN. They were centered on Haven. All their weapon & systems were set to defeat Havenite ones.

So actully, it would be... much more realistic if both RMN and SLN ECM and EW systems were not designed to fight each other.

Though to be fair a lot of the early Haven system (seekers, decoys, etc) were sold to them from the same exact vendors who made that stuff for the SLN. So it'd be more like fighting Soviet electronics after just spending over a decade fighting a war against a Soviet proxy equipped with basically the same electronics. (And the League wasn't noticeably strict about export controls so I doubt the stuff Haven got once fighting started and they realized they were outclassed and needed to buy capabilities was still export grade crap. They were throwing enough money around to get pretty much the full spec current front-line SLN stuff)

And that's before, as several people already pointed out, the Manties captured front line SLN hardware and it's software; allowing them to analyze exactly what it was doing and update their EW software accordingly. (Even today we're a long way from the fixed hardware non-programmable jammers or decoys of the early 60s. The honorverse stuff should be even more software driven; and so easy to update)

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Barricade does not seem so implausible to me. Any missile is far more vulnerable during the ballistic phase.

The issue isn't running over inbound coasting missiles - that would work if you had their location nailed down tightly enough. The issue is that as the missile waves interpenetrate each other at a significant fraction of the speed of light each of your missiles should, logically, only get to run over a single inbound missile.
Because when they shut down their 1st stage wedges they were at least far enough apart to avoid mutual wedge fratricide and there's no reason they'd have used thrusters to move themselves closer together after shut-down because they still need that clearance to light off their 2nd stages. (And that's assuming they're packed as close as physically possible without mutual destruction - leaving 0 room for any of the interior missiles to manouver)

So your outbound missile's wedge can't hit 2 of them at a time because they're more than a wedge width apart. Okay a Mk23's wedge is stated to be a little bigger than most non-CM missiles (though still much smaller than a CM's wedge) so maybe, maybe, just enough so that two inbound missiles at their absolute minimum safe wedge separation can just barely get tagged by one Mk23 flying between them.

But in Barricade the Manti missile magically hit not just 1, or even 2, inbound SLN missiles of the first salvo, but on average 5.6! (500 per salvo, the Barricade launch was 72 Mk23s, but only 91 of the 500 survive it). You wouldn't just need to be at right angles to the inbound missiles to do that - you'd have needed to be slashing through them diagonally back towards their target; your ships (because their missiles are still screaming that way at around 0.2c)

The only way to hit larger numbers of inbound in the same salvo is if they're basically flying one behind the other; in which case the wedges of the leading ones would blind the trailers while the wedges of the trailers block control signals from reaching the leading missiles. It doesn't mater if they're slightly staggered in time while being off to one side or the other because again they're closing on you at over 0.2c - you can't turn hard enough to get from one BC's clump of missile to another unless they're so far behind that they're in a totally different salvo.

kzt wrote:It has been clearly established that the max effective range of the RMN is longer than the RHN. In addition the pH of the RMN is significantly better at long range than the RHN. And the pK is higher. So, given the lifetime supply of missiles that home fleet has, there isn't really any good reason to not start firing as soon as they cross some line such that you go to zero ammo when they reach RHN optimum range. Or some similar metric.

But with externally towed pods - which was the overwhelming majority of the long range firepower he had you don't go to zero when the RHN reaches optimum range. You go to nearly zero ammo (lose all your unlaunched pods) once the first RHN return salvo reaches you.

So say you start firing at the crazy long range of 120,000,000 km. With reasonable closing velocity of around 1% c it'll take about 14 minutes for missiles to cross that range. So you get at many launches as you can get off in 14 minutes; then any remaining missiles are lost unfired. If we assuming about 20 seconds per salvo that's about 42 salvos. So to get all the missiles off you have to launch from long enough range that no enemy fire can reach you until you finish flushing your towed pods - but given the numbers they were hauling along that would be so far out the fire would be nearly ineffective.

If we wait until we don't need a ballistic segment, about 67 million km, we've only got 9 minutes to fire off our missiles, so we can fire about 40% fewer. But nearly halving the range probable more like doubled our PK - and if so waiting gives us more hits.

The complicating factor though is that if you lose too many ships to that first counter-punch then the missiles that got away just moment before the remaining pods got turned into irradiated junk are deprived of guidance and their PK goes to shit.


Basically it would be wonderful to fire first and at long range if the enemy could be trusted not to return fire and wreck our towed pods. And if both sides are using only towed pods it can sometimes still be worth throwing away yours to compel the enemy to waste theirs too before anybody is in truly effective range. But when it's your towed pods against their SD(P)s that's also a losing tactic.



The tactical decision I really don't understand in the BoM is why McKeon's detached Apollo capable SD(P)s didn't roll almost all their Apollo pods to hand off to other SD(P)s. We now know that Apollo even without FTL fire control is far more effective - but we knew even then that the Keyhole IIs had significant reserve capacity; if used to the fullest they can control more far missiles than their SD(P) can continuously roll. So predistributing the pods to other SD(P)s would have allowed much larger FTL controlled salvos - and if those SD(P)s were forced to fire them off under local non-FTL control (to avoid losing them to counter-fire) they'd still be significantly more effective that their internal pods. Basically dying with lots of Apollo pods aboard was idiotic.

Jonathan_S wrote:The tactical decision I really don't understand in the BoM is why McKeon's detached Apollo capable SD(P)s didn't roll almost all their Apollo pods to hand off to other SD(P)s. We now know that Apollo even without FTL fire control is far more effective - but we knew even then that the Keyhole IIs had significant reserve capacity; if used to the fullest they can control more far missiles than their SD(P) can continuously roll. So predistributing the pods to other SD(P)s would have allowed much larger FTL controlled salvos - and if those SD(P)s were forced to fire them off under local non-FTL control (to avoid losing them to counter-fire) they'd still be significantly more effective that their internal pods. Basically dying with lots of Apollo pods aboard was idiotic.

Would that make a difference given just how many missiles were fired at all? At the Battle of Lovat, Yanakov was firing 288 Apollo pods for every two SD(P)s to be killed. Not missiles, 9-missile pods. That was against a single wall of battle from Third Fleet, while Tourville had 30 SD squadrons, 3200 LACs and 100+ BCs to put counter-missiles into space.