Third Fleet and Apollo ships in the Battle of Manticore

cthia wrote: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 melee, 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.

When you're defending your home system, the Single Point of Failure of the entire Alliance, that would not be a consideration. Remove all the safety interlocks too. Fire from however far you need to, maximum effect.

Chin did realise very quickly what Honor was doing, when she found out. Not immediately, but in fairly short order. The problem is that the missiles had just over 9 minutes travel time, the SDs take multiple minutes to translate to alpha and the order takes some measurable time to propagate through the fleet. Remember: Chin's tactical officer first ordered all ships to move before telling Chin that the missiles were incoming.

A completely useless move, regardless of Apollo.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote: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 melee, 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.

When you're defending your home system, the Single Point of Failure of the entire Alliance, that would not be a consideration. Remove all the safety interlocks too. Fire from however far you need to, maximum effect.

Chin did realise very quickly what Honor was doing, when she found out. Not immediately, but in fairly short order. The problem is that the missiles had just over 9 minutes travel time, the SDs take multiple minutes to translate to alpha and the order takes some measurable time to propagate through the fleet. Remember: Chin's tactical officer first ordered all ships to move before telling Chin that the missiles were incoming.

A completely useless move, regardless of Apollo.

When defending your Home system, that is not the time to lose your cool and shoot holes in your own strategy and tactics either. Honor was already gaming out what she had to do, was going to do. McKeon knew what Honor was planning. He would have committed the biggest boo-boo of the entire battle if he had destroyed the systems's best chance of survival by revealing the advantage the cavalry was planning to use.

You can't argue against the RMN revealing the capability of Apollo too soon in the macrocosm, yet preach for McKeon to do exactly that in the microcosm. It would have been totally uncharacteristic of anyone attached to Eighth Fleet. And in this case, quite fatal to Manticore.

Had he been in McKeon's shoes, that's exactly what Pavel Young would have done, caring only for himself.

Chin just missed putting it all together by the hair of her chinny chin chin. The wrong move by McKeon would have alerted her soon enough.

--snipping--

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

Two notes: (1) on the same arc = nearly the same distance to the center of the radius (2nd fleet), and in fact probably better able to target the wall on edge, and (2) Chin's ships can't see through hyper into n-space. So when the SLN destroyer bounces up to tell Chin to come in, they would have to recompute their emergence point on the fly, which would have required time to do and time to communicate, otherwise 5th fleet comes out of hyper in shambled formations. Meanwhile 3rd Fleet is tearing into 2nd Fleet at a much higher rate.

Instead, we're told Kuzak's ships hyper'd in essentially where Theiman and Tourville predicted they would come in.

cthia wrote:When defending your Home system, that is not the time to lose your cool and shoot holes in your own strategy and tactics either. Honor was already gaming out what she had to do, was going to do. McKeon knew what Honor was planning. He would have committed the biggest boo-boo of the entire battle if he had destroyed the systems's best chance of survival by revealing the advantage the cavalry was planning to use.

Fair enough, it's not the time to lose your cool and jeopardise the best chance of survival.

But how would revealing the range have done that? McKeon knew Honor was right behind him, with sufficient force to crush the RHN2nd and 5th from outside their range. I wouldn't call the survival was assured, but I would say revealing the range wouldn't jeopardise Honor's strategy.

If Chin had realised sooner, she would sill have hypered out but might have saved more of her fleet. She wouldn't have come back.

SharkHunter wrote:Two notes: (1) on the same arc = nearly the same distance to the center of the radius (2nd fleet), and in fact probably better able to target the wall on edge, and (2) Chin's ships can't see through hyper into n-space. So when the SLN destroyer bounces up to tell Chin to come in, they would have to recompute their emergence point on the fly, which would have required time to do and time to communicate, otherwise 5th fleet comes out of hyper in shambled formations. Meanwhile 3rd Fleet is tearing into 2nd Fleet at a much higher rate.

Instead, we're told Kuzak's ships hyper'd in essentially where Theiman and Tourville predicted they would come in.

Chin would have had to recompute if Kuzak had emerged somewhere else, but that emergence would have also given Chin the time to do the recomputing since Alliance 3rd would be farther from RHN 2nd.

Instead, Theisman, Tourville and Chin correctly predicted that the first reinforcements would emerge at the limit at the closest point, so they pre-calculated the point where Chin would have to emerge to ambush those reinforcements. Note that trapping force couldn't be close to the emergence point before the reinforcements came back down to n-space, as otherwise it could be detected.

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 location 3rd fleet jumped to maximized her ability to counter 2nd fleet. She could have changed that location several million kilometers in any direction without changing the tactical situation for either side too much, but if she'd come in somewhere else entirely she wouldn't have been able to pin 2nd fleet against the Sphinx orbital defenses or could have given 2nd fleet a chance to reach hyper without being intercepted at all. Basically Haven had set up the entire fleet encounter with the intention of drawing her to that specific location by offering 2nd fleet's survivors as a combination bait and continued threat.

And of course for 5th fleet it didn't matter. They were reacting to 3rd fleet, so they could have jumped in anywhere they needed to in order to react to 3rd fleet's location.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

It appears that routinely carrying heavy external pod loads became standard practice after the Battle of Manticore. Home Fleet had a large store of pods available but only for their prepod SDs; 3rd and 8th apparently didn't have any at all. It's one of those things that makes perfect sense in hindsight, of course - not solely for number-of-pods reasons but to get off those first few massive max-fire-control salvos that rolling pods doesn't always allow time for.

In this case specifically, though, number of pods would have mattered as much as the alpha strike capability would. Assuming McKeon had four ships (there's textev for both three and four, that's AAC editing for ya) and was carrying the latest in asymmetric flatpack pods, he'd have had just under 4800 Apollo pods. At Lovat, 8th fleet was using 144 pods per SD kill (and still wasn't getting full kills all the time, they took 11 salvos of 288 to kill 16 SDs, or 198 pods per kill). At Manticore, KcKeon was launching 96 pod salvos and getting still getting some full kills as well as mission kills. At best, by firing all his ships dry he could have taken out 48 SDs, either half of 5th fleet or a third of 2nd fleet's survivors. More likely he'd have gotten 25-30 kills and another 15 or so mission kills. A heavy external Apollo pod load (if they had that many to spare) could have added another 600 or so pods per ship and up to 24 additional kills. Obviously having external pod loads on 3rd fleet ships could have added a whole lot more. But the important note is that McKeon couldn't have gotten 3rd fleet out alive even if he'd had all his pods launched in the time available, but he could have taken more of them with him.

Jonathan_S wrote: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.

Apollo ships can control 300+ pods at a time. Most engagements seem to revolve around double or quad broadsides since 24 or 48 second intervals between salvos is easier to manage - a balance between size of salvos and rate of salvos. Technically, an Apollo SD could fire itself dry with 4 max-fire-control salvos if it really wanted to.

--snipping--

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Chin would have had to recompute if Kuzak had emerged somewhere else, but that emergence would have also given Chin the time to do the recomputing since Alliance 3rd would be farther from RHN 2nd.

Instead, Theisman, Tourville and Chin correctly predicted that the first reinforcements would emerge at the limit at the closest point, so they pre-calculated the point where Chin would have to emerge to ambush those reinforcements. Note that trapping force couldn't be close to the emergence point before the reinforcements came back down to n-space, as otherwise it could be detected.

Agreed. But 2nd Fleet is also targeting the same "kill box", so let's have Kuzak -- who has an idea where 2nd Fleet is at because they could get a fix after coming through the junction -- comes in 400,000 Km above the ecliptic, and maybe double that to the side -- of where Tourville's ships HAVE to go to escape. Both 2nd and 5th fleet have to recalculate their targeting (presumably taking minutes), and when the trap is sprung, Kuzak has more time to get her LACS into position, more time for the Apollo missiles to chew up Tourville's damaged ships, etc. because the net distance would have only increased by a few seconds of missile flight time at MDM terminal velocities, and only milliseconds of Mark23E communication time. (1/64th...)

Notice that I'm not assuming 3rd Fleet's survival at all -- but likely they'd have lost less ships and destroyed more RHN ships because of that time differential.

--snipping--

ThinksMarkedly wrote:At Lovat, 8th fleet was using 144 pods per SD kill (and still wasn't getting full kills all the time, they took 11 salvos of 288 to kill 16 SDs, or 198 pods per kill).

That doesn't sound right(?) 198 pods per kill is around 1600 missiles per kill... I thought it took 11 salvos of 288 missiles (8 attack missiles per pod less Penaids, etc. * six pods per SD(p) ,* the number of pod-layers * 4 stacked salvos) to take out the first two SDs... because they had no yardstick for how well Apollo would work. That's about 900 attack missiles, allocating a significant overkill percentage just in case. (I'd do the pg. # but an ebook page count depends on font size, etc.)

Let's assume by the Battle of Manticore, they've revised their count to 500-600 hits to mission kill an SD, which is about 90 pods, less Penaids, etc. Then the numbers make a bit more sense... and is why McKeon's ships should have been targeting 2nd Fleet right off the bat.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: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.

No, David has stated that the duration that you can run a pod externally is limited to days. He has some imho questionable justification, but 'it is so written' so that's how it is.

And Kuzak (after she was viciously beaten senseless by some guy wielding a plot hammer) had apparently decreed that, due to obvious imminent combat, that she didn't want anyone to execute their pre-battle drills and they were going to pretend that they were just casually cruising through friendly space. So no, they had no pods deployed. They had no LACS deployed. It was just a peaceful and quiet cruise as they closed on the fleet that his just annihilated Home Fleet in seven minuted of horrific destruction.

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.

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.

Basically Kuzak couldn't let 2nd wander around inside the hyperlimit unchallenged. At the time she dropped out of hyper 2nd was heading straight for Sphinx.

Blowing up the orbital infrastructure around Sphinx would be a BIG DEAL. If 2nd was able to get Sphinx and Manticore's orbital infrastructure Manticore is totally screwed. That's something like 75-80% of their industry gone.

Not to mention that nobody had bothered to start to evacuate the platforms, so it would have been a very bad day.

Truthfully, if 2nd was completely obliterated but succeeded in taking out the platforms around Manticore and Sphinx 5th isn't going to attack 3rd. It's going after Gryphon and blowing their industrial systems up. Sure, they will get their ass shot off doing it, but they will.

At which point the next fleet out of Haven sails into orbit around Manticore and says "Can I talk to Beth?"