Third Fleet and Apollo ships in the Battle of Manticore

SharkHunter wrote: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...)
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400000 km is a rounding error. A light-second or 3 away isn't going to materially make any difference. Kuzak was never going to emerge into missile fire, since Tourville would never fire blindly before Third Fleet transalted. He had no way of knowing where exactly it would emerge (even if he had a good idea of a rough region) nor when it would. Kuzak's ships were faster from the Junction to Manticore-A's hyperlimit than any messenger that the RHN could have left there. The destroyers probably left to warn Tourville that 3rd was coming when they estimated that 3rd was 50-60% through.

Still, I would incorporate a random jink in the emergence position. That's probably SOP when hostile forces are present.

SharkHunter wrote: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.)

The first two took exactly 288 pods to kill.
288 pods of 8+1 missiles are 2304 attack+aid missiles and 288 control missiles. That makes 1152 attack+aid missiles per SD, or about 900 attack missiles.

However, the first two were the closest and least experienced with Apollo birds, so they were probably the easiest. And the range increased and the Havenite tactical sections worked their magic, the number would likely rise. More likely, what happened was that TF 82 continued firing 288 pods at 2 targets, but didn't go back to the 5 targets it had already fired at.

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.

I'm not sure you should revise downwards, since obviously the RHN would have refined their defensive solutions too. First you fire what you know works. Then you determine how well it fared, and adjust.

kzt wrote: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.

I don't remember the text: did she have any CLACs?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:I don't remember the text: did she have any CLACs?

She had 4 CLACs of her own and 6 of Trumans CLAC Squadron 3. CarDiv 34 was still with Eighth Fleet.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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.

Indeed, Honor was some time behind him. Some time. After the first missile flew, the entire battle only lasted 11.5 minutes. A lot happens on this chess board between each move.

Honor's massive launch barely worked on Chin. If McKeon had unwrapped the Christmas present too soon, allowing Chin to get a good look at it long range, Chin would have had plenty of time to figure out that this gift, is not part of any season to be jolly. Too bad McKeon prematurely gave the same gift as Honor. Chin would have already seen that gift, becauss somebody had given it before.

Manticore needed the war to end right then and there. They had gotten the mano a mano match that they wanted, even if they didn't get the view they requested. If Chin had escaped, there would have been another day, another BoM. Eighth Fleet would have had to sit at home to guard the Queen after that partial win. Enter Bolthole. Or, if I were Haven I'd attack again much sooner, after recalling every ship in the fleet. Theisman would have had to hope the godawful weapon was depleted after that massive launch. To roll over is to offend every one of your people who died in all the wars.

It would have been a win for the Peeps to get away with Chin's fleet, because, now, they have the Queen "pinned down" (on the chess board).

Both Queens, Beth, and 8th Fleet.

cthia wrote: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.

Manticore needed the war to end right then and there. They had gotten the mano a mano match that they wanted, even if they didn't get the view they requested. If Chin had escaped, there would have been another day, another BoM. Eighth Fleet would have had to sit at home to guard the Queen after that partial win. Enter Bolthole. Or, if I were Haven I'd attack again much sooner, after recalling every ship in the fleet. Theisman would have had to hope the godawful weapon was depleted after that massive launch. To roll over is to offend every one of your people who died in all the wars.

It would have been a win for the Peeps to get away with Chin's fleet, because, now, they have the Queen "pinned down" (on the chess board). [/quote]

No, as I said, Chin or the RHN wouldn't have come back. The entire gambit was that Manticore didn't have enough of the Apollo missiles and ships converted to use them available. Honor had shown that they did. Moreover, By the time Chin got back to Haven, reported to Theisman and they came back again, 6-8 weeks would have passed, with yet more ships being added to Eighth (Home) Fleet.

There's no Havenite force that could have broken that. We never got an accurate count, but let's say that Honor destroyed 60 of the 90 SD(P)s that Chin had left at the time. That would increase the total forces available to Theisman from 280 to 340 SD(P)s. That is, not a material change.

The only question is whether McKeon realised this. I think he would have, since he was within 60 million km of two Havenite formations that accounted for 350 SD(P)s. As we discussed upthread, the Alliance must have estimated this accounted to an even larger proportion of the RHN than it actually did. So everyone knew that whoever ended up in possession of the Manticore-A orbitals after this battle would be the winner of the war.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

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.

But the flatstack pods, including the Apollo armed ones, are self-tractoring so can stay (as kzt pointed out) inside the wedge where they don't affect acceleration[1]. (Note that the vastly higher number of pods tractored to home fleet's legacy SDs didn't reduct their accel)

They do block sensors and CM tubes there if you've got too many of them - but since you're planning to shoot them off before return fire can reach you that's not a major concern.

[1] Though I have to assume "inside the wedge" is an imprecise shorthand for inside the volume the ships compensator field already stretched beyond the hull. Because increasing the compensated area absolutely does reduce acceleration - so having a pile of pods 200m thick should slow a ship to a crawl even though that's still over 100km within the edge of the wedge.

SharkHunter wrote: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.

To elaborate on that ThinksMarkedly said, Chin's fifth fleet wasn't predicting where their target was; so being unpredictable wouldn't have helped.

RHNS Douglas MacArthur (a BC 2nd fleet left hanging back for just this purpose) took the execute signal from Guerriere to 5th fleet and would have shared sensor information showing Kuzak's position and vector. (And AAC specifically tells us Chin had to adjust based on that last minute information; and because that's tricky she emerged about 10 million km farther from 3rd than ideally planned)


So Chin's fifth fleet knew right where to aim - and 2nd fleet being is a less optimal position wouldn't help at bit; Chin's fleet would still be adjusting based on knowing right where to go.

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 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.

I know you said you didn't get a chance to look up the exact distances - but even without exact distances what target do you think McKeon might have even had that would exposed Apollo's max range?

Remember that a Lovat, before Apollo was revealed, Giscard thought that Honor's trap force has screwed up their astrogation by dropping in too far back for their MDMs to be truly effective against his larger force of SD(P)s. (Exact range, per AAC, 54,900,000 km)

Having been shown Apollo was lethally effective at that range, and hoping to trap the Apollo equipped 8th fleet, the entire point of Chin's trap was to emerge close enough to minimize the difference between light-speed and FTL control of the missiles - so far closer than the already revealed Apollo range from Lovat. So when McKeon immediately engages her her entire fleet is closer than anything Apollo has shot at before. (Exact range 41,700,000 km - and she'd wanted to be 10 million closer[1])

The only more distant target is the remains of 2nd fleet (and if McKeon had fired immediately on them it would have been before he knew Chin was even coming). And yes, 3rd fleet didn't engage the damaged 2nd fleet immediately after hypering in. But they were withing powered MDM range, they just wanted to wait until the hit percentages of the non-Apollo MDMs which were the vast majority of their weapons, were better. I don't think McKeon engaging would have revealed significantly more Apollo range than at Lovat. (And looking it up, the range was 60,000,000 km - so slightly more than Lovat but not a huge difference)


But Honor dropped in so far back her missiles needed a ballistic coast segment (exact range 72,930,000 km) - which is why Chin thought she was bluffing. McKeon literally didn't have any target he could have fired on that was that far out.

So this whole tangent seems moot - there was never any need to decide whether or not to reveal Apollo's max range. And just remembering the plan was for Chin to engage closely enough Apollo wasn't a major factor, and Honor engaged from far enough she needed a ballistic phase should have made that clear - even without exact ranges.



[1] "Chin's astrogation had been off by a good ten million kilometers, although it was hard to fault her for that. She'd had only a handful of minutes to adjust her position after MacArthur's arrival"

Jonathan_S wrote:The only more distant target is the remains of 2nd fleet (and if McKeon had fired immediately on them it would have been before he knew Chin was even coming). And yes, 3rd fleet didn't engage the damaged 2nd fleet immediately after hypering in. But they were withing powered MDM range, they just wanted to wait until the hit percentages of the non-Apollo MDMs which were the vast majority of their weapons, were better.

This is the main issue right there. What was she worried about, ammunition expenditure?

From her perspective, they have a trapped, shot up fleet in range of Sphinx. God knows what's the situation over there, who's in command and what their orders are in this situation.
But the last thing you want to do is to give them time to think. You engage them the second you can get some accuracy out of your missile salvos.
Keeps them preoccupied and thus lessens the chances of a launch against Sphinx orbital infrastructure.

Also, Third Fleet is gonna enter the range of Second Fleet eventually. Tourville still has the equivalent of the combat power of eighty wallers left according to Kuzaks staff.
It's completely insane to just stroll into that kind of firepower without opening fire as soon as possible. Yes, your accuracy will suck and you'll need a hell of a lot more missiles. But your enemy won't be able to fight back effectively.
The only smart move is to start hammering him as soon possible and keep pressing hard right until the end. If it means shooting yourself dry so what. It also means Second Fleet dies sooner and you get more of your people out alive.

Of course, the situation changes once Fifth Fleet shows up but that's beside the point.

What I find maddening about this, Kuzak's disastrous performance isn't even necessary for the plot.
She could have engaged sooner. She could have rolled pods. McKeon could have joined her in attacking Second Fleet.
Second Fleed would suffer more losses but the overall story wouldn't change at all.

There aren't even any adjustments necessary to make this work. Have Kuzak be her normal self and do things by the book. She stacks pods and opens fire much sooner than she actually did.
Tourville would then obviously signal immediately for Chin to hyper in.
This would actually mean that Kuzak would inflict less damage for each missile fire on Second Fleet, since she is much further away than she actually was when she opened fire.
But she would fire more of them and Apollo would work in her favor too.
So the overall damage to Second Fleet should be about the same.
And if not, Tourville had 75 ships left after Third Fleet was rendered combat ineffective.
If you give him just slightly more ships at the beginning (two or three BatRons) it's the same end result. OR just let him survive with just 50 wallers left, it's all made up numbers anyway.
There'd be no influence on the plot. Third Fleet would still be destroyed and Honor would still save everyone.
Only Kuzak would have gone down with dignity.

Jonathan_S wrote:[1] Though I have to assume "inside the wedge" is an imprecise shorthand for inside the volume the ships compensator field already stretched beyond the hull. Because increasing the compensated area absolutely does reduce acceleration - so having a pile of pods 200m thick should slow a ship to a crawl even though that's still over 100km within the edge of the wedge.

Not quite. If we can assume that the tractor units installed on the pods are capable of holding against absurd levels of force (mass of the pod times 600+ gravities) the ship does not have to extend its compensator field - assuming it even could. Anything inside the wedge is going to accelerate at the same rate as the ship, it just has to be able to take the acceleration on its own. That's what happened in HotQ when Thunderer towed Masadan LACs to Yeltsin.

Alternatively, the pods could be towed very close to the hull. Basically in contact with it. That way the ship only has to compensate for ~25 meters outside the hull, which presumably they have to do anyway to keep things like external antennae and sensor arrays from snapping off.