Third Fleet and Apollo ships in the Battle of Manticore

Nobdy in 3rd had deployed pods because plot hammer or Kuzak’s newly acquired crack habit. Whatever.

kzt wrote:Nobdy in 3rd had deployed pods because plot hammer or Kuzak’s newly acquired crack habit. Whatever.

Well, like what annoyed me in Top Gun, there was wasted time celebrating a kill, rather than finding another target, or several. McKeon, paraphrasing, "We got one! Now let's see if we can find another to do the same." Duh, just get on with it! I just didn't think that was professional, though it makes for great cinematic drama. People were dying, there was no time to celebrate, or someone on the other side may be celebrating your death.

I remember a scene in one of the books where Honor and her staff adjourned to game out how to use Apollo effectively. IINM, McKeon was part of that very important staff meeting. Yet Honor alone seems to be the only one keen on "How to squeeze maximum use out of Apollo."

At any rate, firing as soon as he came out of hyper may have made his ship more obvious to the Peeps as the one to target.

****** *

Kzt, no matter how many times I hear you comment on kuzak's crack habit, it's never going to get old. You've got a winner there, and I'm going to have to incorporate it in the Humor thread somehow.

For the moment, locarno24 has me cracking up, pun intended, on his post there. LOL

cthia wrote:
At any rate, firing as soon as he came out of hyper may have made his ship more obvious to the Peeps as the one to target.

Nobody is going to live forever. And at 70 million KM, if he can get 2nd to empty their magazines at him it will be worthwhile. And precision targeting at 70 million KM seems questionable without Apollo. 5th couldn't localize them at 50 million KM.

And every 48 seconds they will kill at least one SD(P) of 2nd. I think ToF is about 12 minutes, which means 15 salvos are already on the way before they realize the danger when the most combat capable SD(P)s start to blow up. By the time 2nd can hit them the Apollo units will have been firing continually for almost 25 minutes, so they are about out of ammo.

munroburton wrote:I don't buy the notion that he could have been stacking pods at all after the ambush was revealed. Fifth Fleet had 100 SD(P)s, Second still had around 150 and both of them were hammering Kuzak's entire formation of ~55.

AAC wrote:In fact, the four Apollo-capable ships of McKeon's squadron were killing Havenite wallers in rapid succession, and Slowacki was too caught up in his task to realize that while he'd been killing five superdreadnoughts, the Havenites had already killed nine of Admiral Kuzak's. And it wouldn't be long before-
"Incoming!" someone shouted, and Intransigent lurched indescribably as the first deadly hits slammed home.

That happened five minutes after Fifth Fleet dropped out of hyperspace. In other words, McKeon's squadron only had time to fire five or six salvos.

If McKeon isn't engaging 2nd fleet as soon as it's in range he at least should have been pre-rolling Apollo pods.

His fire control is designed around controlling salvos of at least 24 pods (quad stacked salvo) but seems to also be able to handle a large number of salvos (at least 45) one behind the next in flight -- all under FTL control.

From the planned launch distance it'd take any RHN return fire at least 7 minutes to reach McKeon's ships. At the 12 seconds it takes to roll a single salvo of pods he'd expect to have time to get off 35 salvos before the first return fire could reach him. And during that 7 minutes he doesn't have to worry about losing any pre-rolled pods to proximity kills. So it's safe to stack pods in preparation for opening fire.

In just 20 minutes he could have pre-rolled 100 patterns of Apollo pods. That head start would have let him fire off quad stacked salvos at 12 second intervals for 6.4 minutes; 33 quad-salvos. Now when 5th fleet drops in behind Kuzak's force, as closer range he won't have as much time before he starts losing pods, but if he'd be pre-deploying them in anticipation of taking down Haven's 2nd fleet as quickly as possible his salvos at Haven's 5th would have been 4x as powerful - at least until he started losing pods. So instead of killing 5 of Haven's SDs while Kuzak lost 9 he might have killed 15 or 20 even if nothing else about the engagement changed.

Jonathan_S wrote:If McKeon isn't engaging 2nd fleet as soon as it's in range he at least should have been pre-rolling Apollo pods.

Any SD that rolled more pods than they could control would need to tractor those pods, at the cost of losing acceleration. That means either being left behind by the SDs that didn't roll pods or the entire formation slowing down to match. The other 50 SDs in the formation have a much worse hit ratio than the Apollo-capable ones, so that would mean being at a disadvantage for much longer.

And RHN SDs probably can out-accelerate Manticoran ones with rolled pods, so that would leave Second Fleet to disengage and go for the Manticore planet.

The time to roll pods was before transitioning back to n-space.

No they don’t. They limpet them onto the hull with the built in tractors. No effect on acceleration. There is no impact on accelration until you have stuff outside the field of the wedge, so in theory you could just build a stack 50 deep and tractor that inside your wedge.

And given that nobody was shooting at them they had plenty of space on the hull to cover.

One more tactical thought... And yes, we're talking about a book long after it was sent to the publisher, so the plot is "as was" and we could just call it the plot-hammer. Anyway, my question is:

Why was 3rd Fleet's micro-jump predictable?

Putting myself in Kuzak's shoes, there's no reason for her to micro-jump to where Tourville expected, in fact, as the battle geometry appears in my head (which admittedly could be wrong), where she comes in seems like a tactically inferior position even before 5th fleet shows up. Given that the hyper limit is a 3 dimensional set of arcs, I can see an optimal position... but as a tactician, I'd avoid that area in space like the plague, and come in on another part of one of the arcs. Chin jumps in to find an empty mousetrap; from that different spot on the arc, 3rd Fleet is defending from missiles in only one plane, making her LAC defenses much more effective.

It also gives McKeon an interior defensive position and allows him to start launching at 2nd Fleet for longer, as other posters have noted, and possibly shooting until dry once 5th Fleet tries to close the range.

Plot-wise, I don't mind if the outcome for the Apollo SD(p)s is the same -- just that they didn't fight like a RMN fleet admiral would have fought.

kzt wrote:No they don’t. They limpet them onto the hull with the built in tractors. No effect on acceleration. There is no impact on accelration until you have stuff outside the field of the wedge, so in theory you could just build a stack 50 deep and tractor that inside your wedge.

And given that nobody was shooting at them they had plenty of space on the hull to cover.

I'd imagine that warships in a time of war already have their hulls covered with pods as much as they can. There's no point in rolling pods from internal storage until those on the hull are nearly exhausted, not to mention there's not much hull left to limpet to. Even if you didn't have enough Apollo pods: in a battle, you don't want to shoot yourself dry, so I'd fill the ship or the hull with older pods to fire after exhausting the Apollo birds.

You're right of course about tractoring inside the wedge. Though Manticore hadn't come up with the idea of tractoring pods to one another yet, so number of deployed pods would be limited by the space around and behind the ship inside the wedge. And we know there's a pretty low limit for that.

SharkHunter wrote:One more tactical thought... And yes, we're talking about a book long after it was sent to the publisher, so the plot is "as was" and we could just call it the plot-hammer. Anyway, my question is:

Why was 3rd Fleet's micro-jump predictable?

Putting myself in Kuzak's shoes, there's no reason for her to micro-jump to where Tourville expected, in fact, as the battle geometry appears in my head (which admittedly could be wrong), where she comes in seems like a tactically inferior position even before 5th fleet shows up. Given that the hyper limit is a 3 dimensional set of arcs, I can see an optimal position... but as a tactician, I'd avoid that area in space like the plague, and come in on another part of one of the arcs. Chin jumps in to find an empty mousetrap; from that different spot on the arc, 3rd Fleet is defending from missiles in only one plane, making her LAC defenses much more effective.

The problem is that if you choose any point besides the optimal, the missiles will have longer range and the time to interception increases too. Against a 2:1 odds (after Home Fleet destroyed 3/5ths of the RHN 2nd Fleet), Kuzak needed the best engagement range possible and needed to force RHN2nd to fight.

As for the ambushing force, it's not a factor in the consideration. First, because no one predicted that Haven would drop another 100 SD(P)s after coming with 250. Second, because the ambushing force will know where Alliance 3rd is and therefore can choose where it wants to translate back.

I haven't had a chance to cross reference my memory with textev, so I'll play it safe. Whatever tactic McKeon adopted when he joined the fray, he couldn't exceed the range of Apollo that had already been revealed. If he had, Chin would have immediately known the fire that came from Harrington's fleet was no bluff, and she would have known to hyper out immediately.

As it stood, McKeon remained within the range and capability that had already been revealed. Saving the gravy for Honor. McKeon was under the obligation not to spill any wine before it's time.