Pod layers.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:Actually, McKeon had Honor's reloads with him, so he could have had the ammo ships transit with him and Kusak's fleet to Manticore. There, they could have grabbed apollo and non-apollo pods from the ammo carriers, other ammo carriers at the terminus, and the terminus defenses and carried them externally into battle. We've already determined that non Apollo ships can carry apollo pods for apollo ships (Spear Carriers), so dozens of Kusak's ships could have helped carry the Apollo loads.

There probably hadn't been time to load those pods on the ships lining up for transit ASAP. It must have taken 2 hours, but Kuzak's ships already had limpeted pods; they'd have had to jettison those and then add others. I don't suppose this can be done on-the-fly or at a significant quantity. Though whatever little they could do on the last 10 SDs could have made a difference.

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Jonathan_S wrote:

tlb wrote:It was not enough to say that Haven probably would not attack, despite it being shown that Apollo was a game changer. It was the duty of the Admiralty to worry about the worst case, of Haven being so desperate that they would attack before it could be fully implemented. There were danger signs, in the delay of the system defense option; so why weren't regular Apollo pods issued to serve for defense?

Presumably because it was brand new system and the production lines hadn't generated massive surpluses of the pods yet. Initial operational use of Apollo until the Battle of Manticore was only a couple of months. And now that I went and looked I didn't realize quite how limited its availability really was!

When they first contemplated sending 8th fleet back out with Apollo, to show that Solon hadn't pulled their teeth they didn't even have enough build for the existing ships in 8th fleet to carry full loads of them -- much less have any reloads!

At All Costs - Ch. 52 wrote:at the moment, only Eighth Fleet is really equipped to handle them, and even they have only partial loadouts on the new pods. We're attempting to get into full production on them as quickly as possible, but we've hit some bottlenecks, and security issues have restricted the number of production facilities we could commit to them

And then after Lovat (which shot away a good chunk of the Apollo birds they'd brought there) when they looked at a follow-up against Jouett there had been enough production refill the fleet's pod bays again; plus a little extra

At All Costs - Ch. 60 wrote:we're getting a handle on the production bottlenecks we've been experiencing. We're going to have a lot more of the Mistletoe-modified drones available, starting in about three weeks, and production of the Apollo pods and control platforms is beginning to accelerate, as well. We've got enough now to completely re-ammunition your command and began establishing a modest stockpile to support your operations.

(This said within hours of Imperators return from Lovat -- so the "re-ammunition" is just to top up whatever they shot off at Lovat plus swap out any remaining non-Apollo pods they might have had to bring on that op. It's not an extra full reload in addition to a full pod-load already aboard.

In the weeks that follow that return Manticore got at least 22 IAN SD(P)s out of their Keyhole II refit, and seemingly scrounged up Apollo loads for them -- that was the Task Force 16 that joined 8th fleet just over a week before the BoM (and more than doubled its force of Keyhole II SD(P)s.

There just weren't ammo dumps full of Apollo missiles to hand out - basically they'd have had maybe 8 weeks worth of production; outside of what was in 8th fleet's pod bays. That's not much, and most of it would have been at Trevor's Star in the ammo ships of 8th Fleet's logistics train.

Theemile wrote:
Kusak had no limpeted pods, that was Homefleet. That is the problem, her ships waiting for others to queue through the Junction COULD have limpeted pods, but they didn't. They didn't even roll their own pods in advance and limpet them. As I said, Kusak played this like it was 1912 and she had normal SDs and didn't use any of the manty warfare multipliers.

kzt wrote:

Theemile wrote:
Kusak had no limpeted pods, that was Homefleet. That is the problem, her ships waiting for others to queue through the Junction COULD have limpeted pods, but they didn't. They didn't even roll their own pods in advance and limpet them. As I said, Kusak played this like it was 1912 and she had normal SDs and didn't use any of the manty warfare multipliers.

That’s what happens when the Admiral passes around the crack pipe in the command center.

Daryl wrote:Channelling current Russian military command?

SharkHunter wrote:The problem I have with the Battle of Manticore is that D'Orville / Home Fleet had an option that would have stopped Tourville from deploying pods hardly at all, and no time for the Donkeys Start early sending salvo(s) that the Haven SD(Ps) have to keep stopping, i.e. a long string of not much designed to do much damage to the SD's EXCEPT... every time the RH podlayers would have tried to deploy pods, RMN missiles nukes go off and -kaboom- fry the suckers. With just enough shipkillers just to keep the game interesting.

It's the MDM version of what Minotaur did to the Haven forces using her LACs at 2nd Hancock. Took away the ability for the RH ships to deploy their hammer, leaving the screwdrivers to TRY to match the RMN hammers coming from all sides.

SharkHunter wrote:The problem I have with the Battle of Manticore is that D'Orville / Home Fleet had an option that would have stopped Tourville from deploying pods hardly at all, and no time for the Donkeys Start early sending salvo(s) that the Haven SD(Ps) have to keep stopping, i.e. a long string of not much designed to do much damage to the SD's EXCEPT... every time the RH podlayers would have tried to deploy pods, RMN missiles nukes go off and -kaboom- fry the suckers. With just enough shipkillers just to keep the game interesting.

It's the MDM version of what Minotaur did to the Haven forces using her LACs at 2nd Hancock. Took away the ability for the RH ships to deploy their hammer, leaving the screwdrivers to TRY to match the RMN hammers coming from all sides.

The range at launch was 65,770,000 kilometers. Flight time for Home Fleet's faster MDMs was 7.6 minutes, and their closing speed as they streaked into Second Fleet's teeth was 246,972 kilometers per second. Second Fleet's slower missiles took fifteen more seconds to reach their targets, and had a closing speed of "only" 237,655 KPS.

tlb wrote:As for recon drones; they are much slower, but the forts at Sphinx could have deployed some. I am not sure what difference it would make , since Home Fleet only has what it has. If only they had tractored Apollo pods, instead of the regular pods that they were issued.

SharkHunter wrote:The problem I have with the Battle of Manticore is that D'Orville / Home Fleet had an option that would have stopped Tourville from deploying pods hardly at all, and no time for the Donkeys Start early sending salvo(s) that the Haven SD(Ps) have to keep stopping, i.e. a long string of not much designed to do much damage to the SD's EXCEPT... every time the RH podlayers would have tried to deploy pods, RMN missiles nukes go off and -kaboom- fry the suckers. With just enough shipkillers just to keep the game interesting.

It's the MDM version of what Minotaur did to the Haven forces using her LACs at 2nd Hancock. Took away the ability for the RH ships to deploy their hammer, leaving the screwdrivers to TRY to match the RMN hammers coming from all sides.