?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

penny wrote: Premise: If an LD gets a chance to bite Imperator, it will. It doesn't matter how the two will get into striking range of each other. Shit happens. And the LD may strike even if it has to abandon its current mission.

Yes, both ships die. I've already agreed (multiple times) that this is the outcome if the LD fires. I'm not certain it would in the first place.

My problem is not this conclusion, given the premises. This conclusion is uninteresting. It's the premise itself I have a problem with.

Your problem stems from your lack of imagination and the danger of your erroneous assumptions. Both ships won't die if as you said the LD simply deploys g-torps or whatever. But what if the LD has shot itself dry and the tastiest fly is heading its way?

Thinksmarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:And I do not think arrogance should allow one to assign blame to the LD for allowing such a scenario to happen. That is preposterous. Your imagination is limited and born out of arrogance and complacence for the almighty Manty. My entire point for posting that true story of me almost walking into a huge spider web was for the sole purpose of showing that it can happen. How in the hell did I manage to let that happen is beyond me. But the spider was not in danger. I was. The forest has been missed for the trees, the fact that I almost stumbled into the spider and its web highlights the fact that I didn't detect it. Since I didn't detect it, I was not at battle stations. Moreover, I had exposed myself! The spider had ambushed me and literally caught me with my pants down and with my useless weapon in my hand.

Yes, I think it should, because the LD skipper had better options to effect the same outcome without loss of his ship. Therefore, losing the ship means he screwed up.

Not if he has shot himself dry and the only weapon he has is the LD itself. And the LD has a chance at the salamander who is heading his way. And Harrington is at the top of the CAASAP list. Honor is worth several LDs. I won't budge on that exchange rate. It is simple math and strategy.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:The fact that the enemy formation came right on top of him means he screwed up criminally.

Another dangerous assumption born of arrogance and loyalty to anything made in Manticore.

Or it means that he takes his responsibility seriously and he is prosecuting the war as it was strategically laid out in the War Room, with Honor as a target if it presents itself.

It could also mean that he likes the odds of his success as the situation is presenting itself. Again, your imagination is lacking. You cannot conceive of a situation where the MBS is under a lot of heat in the opening phase of the war. They have been stunned, and infrastructure has once again gone poof. The Grand Fleet is under heavy fire and maybe Honor has to retreat. She might even have suffered heavy losses. If she is retreating then the normal arrangement of the fleet will not be the same. They will be situated around Honor for mutual defense like when at Hancock Station where she was screaming "get those ships in closer."

But Imperator might be near the head of the pack, the last ship for a missile to reach, but the first one ensnared in a spider web. Consider that the Inner System is supposed to be enemy free.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:I'm going to continue insisting on that: an LD that is destroyed incompletely means a lot of hardware can be recovered by the enemy. That means giving Sonja and Shannon a leg up in countering the MAlign tech. So I think that the CO's priority list has an entry even higher than "assassinate Honor:" don't help Sonja and Shannon.

True, you never want your assets to fall into enemy hands. So that is always a concern. But a navy cannot handicap its operation with too much concern with that than what one ordinarily designs into it. Self destruct. It might not work completely, but the point is moot if the MA conquers the MBS. You said yourself that the MA has to go for the jugular. Those were my same exact words in another thread. And going for the jugular is not being timid and afraid to bring the toys out of the garage.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:I also argued that your analogy with the spider's web is different and would point to a different situation. The squadron with HMS Imperator walking into the LD's trap is a sensible scenario. The LD exposing itself when it doesn't have to is the problem.

We are never going to agree on this if you do not accept the obvious premise that I posited initially. Killing Honor is worth the loss of at least two LDs. Maybe a few. Maybe several. If Honor, White Haven, Henke and Petersen are removed from the board even at the cost of 4 LDs. It would be a very sad and atrocious exchange rate for the GA. Who would be left to successfully prosecute the war?

Thinksmarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:But the spider can not be blamed if that is his nest! The lack of imagination confines your thoughts to a MBS that is intact and had not been attacked. After a war has started -- the opening volley in the MBS will kick the war off -- then assets will be lost. Screens will be lost. Part of Honor's fleet will be gone. It will become a chess match.

If I assume that this is the only trap possible that the LD can prepare, then the war will be over very quickly. As I said, the MAlign cannot afford a war of attrition where it is losing 1:1 or even 1 LD for every 2 SDs, because the GA has far more ships than the MAN has LDs. They can build faster too.

It is a very successful exchange rate if the MA's targets were top Tacticians and Strategists.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:If this includes destroying the GA's ability to build more SDs, with the GA not knowing where Darius is, then things change some. But that still leaves a several hundred SDs available while the GA rebuilds its infrastructure, while the MAN has no ships to send.

And the GA has nobody strategically and tactically qualified to send to Darius. I will go out on a limb and say that Darius would love to see anyone other than Harrington hypering into Darius.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:My strategy for destroying the MBS has always been the same. The MA has unprecedented technology that will allow them access to tactics unavailable to any other combatant.

I'm not disputing that.

I'm disputing the tactic that you came up with, because I think there are better tactics.

There might not be any other tactic available. The LD might have shot itself dry. And the order of battle of what is left of Honor's fleet or the particulars of the upcoming engagement might be welcome to the LD.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:For instance, ambushing an opponent is a staple of war. A common tactic. An LDs stealth will allow it to do so easily. Regardless of whether the LD is in danger itself.

Yes, it can do that easily, regardless of danger. But if it also has available one that does not include the danger component, why would it choose the one with it?

See above. It has shot itself dry, and the fly of all flies is heading its way. What wound Edward Saganami have done for his SK. He would have taken the equivalent of Honor's doppelganger out at risk of his own life.

Thinksmarkedly wrote:

penny wrote:Getting sufficient resources behind enemy lines has always been both a plan and a problem. Most of you are not carrying that thought through. You can only imagine a healthy MBS whose shiny new ships don't have any scratches on them before the first flaming datum. After that, all bets are off. And if an LD or three has gotten behind enemy lines and Grand fleet is taking casualties battling the MA's ships with wedges, then Honor's weakened fleet, scrambling, anxious, maneuvering under fire while being completely oblivious of the LDs location or existence, can certainly stumble right into an LDs kill zone. That LD will strike! It has a chance to eliminate Honor!

After the LD fires its ship-borne weapons (anything other than a spider torpedo), the LD's position is accurately pinpointed.

So if it doesn't want its own position pinpointed to everyone in the system, the only weapon it has (that we know of) is firing more spider torpedoes.

It does not matter if the secondary objective of taking out Harrington has been successful.

penny wrote:Heavens to Murgatroyd, a g-torp can brake ... then loiter? It can pat its foot lightly while waiting in your driveway and you will never even see it? Why didn't I get that memo? And why wouldn't there be a g-torp loitering off the stern of every ship?

Jonathan_S wrote:Don't see why they couldn't brake and loiter. (At least until they run out of power).

A minor correction occurs to me. The Silver Bullets were specifically designed to brake and loiter; however the torpedoes of Oyster Bay fired on the move, from Mission of Honor:

Chapter 28 wrote:The Mike Attack torpedoes reached the proper point in space. They aligned themselves with finicky precision, doublechecked and triple-checked their targeting, then fired.
Every one of them activated in the space of a single second, and three seconds later, not one of them still existed. But their closing speed on their target well over seventy thousand kilometers per second; the target in question was completely unprotected by impeller wedge or side wall, which increased their standoff range to the next best thing to a half-million kilometers; and their approach vectors had been carefully calculated.

As Jonathan_S said, the torpedoes may have a theoretical ability to brake and loiter; but that loiter time will be nothing in comparison. The Silver Bullets even had solar panels to reduce their power consumption rate.

penny wrote:Let's apply your analogy. But apply it correctly.

The piece of paper in this instance would be the thread itself (or the situation) offered up for discussion. Examine the piece of paper -- the premise -- all you want. That is what we all want, to discuss what is at hand. And the piece of paper is at hand.

But you are asking the judge to strike the piece of paper from evidence altogether. Because you disagree how it ended up at point C. The Court room.

Well, yes. Evidence has to be authenticated and its provenance ascertained. Illegally-obtained evidence isn't admissible in court and can't be used for any conclusions (fruit of the poisonous tree).

tlb wrote:Don't we assume that the spider-drive still requires sails in order to make full use of hyperspace? If so, then do the nodes for the sails require a taper near the front and back nodes? That is not what I would imagine from the description of "truncated pyramidal shape"; I get the image of a spindle with a constant triangular cross-section through most of its length (closer to Jonathan_S, but with the ending taper of Theemile). Whether that triangular shape has flat sides or ones that bulge outward is up to the designer. Unfortunately MaxxQ has never given us a picture, as he seems to have moved on to other things.

Quite possibly still requires sails.
If so with sails only (never forming a wedge with those alpha nodes) it probably still requires the same kind of clearance.

But boy would it be nice to pin RFC down and get some definitive answers so we could stop going "well, maybe.. But it could be" on some of these basic technical issues.


However; instead of tapering the hull, they could just use larger impeller rings that stood well clear from the hull, so no part of the spider ship protruded from the resulting larger safe zone. For a ship with a compensator that'd be wildly inefficient, as you'd be wasting a huge amount of your compensated area -- resulting in the lower acceleration that a ship of that larger size would have; but without any offsetting advantage of being that physically bigger ship. But since the spider ships don't use compensators anyway that major downside to oversized impeller rings seems moot for them...

penny wrote:But what if the LD has shot itself dry and the tastiest fly is heading its way?

Ok, so the LD has already used its g-torps and is about to leave when it notices Honor putting herself in a vulnerable position. Let's ignore how it finds that out for the moment. Yes, in that case, it might consider a worthwhile sacrifice to suicide itself if it manages to take Honor with it.

I still find the scenario highly unlikely. First, I still don't think 1 LD for Honor is an acceptable trade-off, but this is subjective so I won't belabour it. I'll accept it as a given.

But second and most importantly, the scenario requires the LD to have used up all its g-torps, in this system. That means they've been expended and have destroyed all sorts of stuff. The surprise factor is gone. So why is Honor acting as if it's still peace time and nothing has happened? She's not going to be in a shuttle. Her ship, whichever one it is, will be in the middle of a fleet, with cruisers and destroyed as a shell, with LACs as an outer shell, and recon drones as an even outer shell. The chance of detection is way too high for the LD. It shouldn't be going anywhere near that fleet that is saturating near space with active radar.

Third, the entire system has just seen its infrastructure attacked by unseen forces, so no ship is going to fly in a straight line. The chance the LD can line up a shot down the throat of an SD with sidewalls in the middle of a formation is negligible. That is, the chance of success is very small.

That is, in this scenario, there's a very low probability of success with a non-negligible chance that the ship will be crippled instead of destroyed.

Or it means that he takes his responsibility seriously and he is prosecuting the war as it was strategically laid out in the War Room, with Honor as a target if it presents itself.

I don't have a problem with that being a tactical objective that every CO is aware of.

I have a problem with the scenarios you're laying out. They're implausible.

It could also mean that he likes the odds of his success as the situation is presenting itself. Again, your imagination is lacking. You cannot conceive of a situation where the MBS is under a lot of heat in the opening phase of the war. They have been stunned, and infrastructure has once again gone poof. The Grand Fleet is under heavy fire and maybe Honor has to retreat. She might even have suffered heavy losses. If she is retreating then the normal arrangement of the fleet will not be the same. They will be situated around Honor for mutual defense like when at Hancock Station where she was screaming "get those ships in closer."

But Imperator might be near the head of the pack, the last ship for a missile to reach, but the first one ensnared in a spider web. Consider that the Inner System is supposed to be enemy free.

Ok, keep it coming because I wasn't conceiving of this scenario. This one isn't good enough yet.

It is similar to the case of HMS Ajax with Mike Henke aboard during the Battle of Solon, when Giscard did manage to destroy one of two SDs in Honor's fleet and cripple some of the other ships. Ajax had reduced acceleration, so it was left behind so the other ships could escape.

The problem is the difference between these two scenarios. In the case of the Battle of Solon, speed/acceleration was of the essence. Eighth Fleet had to exfiltrate from the enemy system to reach safety. In the case of g-torps, remaining in a group conveys safety, so there's no need for one ship to fall behind, unless it's lost all acceleration (dead in the water). The scenario assumes that they were not in a hostile system, so no one is trying to exfiltrate either. They're not going to abandon the MBS or Trevor's Star that easily. Besides, if you can't see the attackers, no one direction is better than any other, so a random course is fine.

If Honor was in a ship that is crippled, she'll use an escape pod or shuttle, and you won't be able to tell which one. The LD can't shoot at the shuttles and pods because it wouldn't have been close enough at the outset of the hostilities. So Honor gets picked up by another ship, which puts her back in the middle of the formation. Not to mention you can't tell which ship it was.

And if Honor was in such a ship, how do you know she isn't dead yet? If the attackers had known which ship she was on and had a chance of attacking it, they would have. So this scenario assumes they did and crippled it enough that the ship is a mission-kill anyway, with several thousand deaths aboard already. The alternative is that her ship is very much viable and approaching it takes us back to the beginning of this reply: low probability of success, high probability of leaving hardware behind.

True, you never want your assets to fall into enemy hands. So that is always a concern. But a navy cannot handicap its operation with too much concern with that than what one ordinarily designs into it. Self destruct. It might not work completely, but the point is moot if the MA conquers the MBS. You said yourself that the MA has to go for the jugular. Those were my same exact words in another thread. And going for the jugular is not being timid and afraid to bring the toys out of the garage.

Sure, but the possible gains have to be commensurate with the risk.

I don't think the MAlign can conquer the MBS (your scenario of decloaking in orbit and demanding the Queen's surrender). They can cripple it though. That would be a worthwhile trade-off in case they fail and leave some hardware behind to be analysed.

This may be the first portion of the scenario above where the fleet Honor is on gets jumped and there's mayhem. That might be why the LD has no more torpedoes to launch. But the continuation doesn't follow.

We are never going to agree on this if you do not accept the obvious premise that I posited initially. Killing Honor is worth the loss of at least two LDs. Maybe a few. Maybe several. If Honor, White Haven, Henke and Petersen are removed from the board even at the cost of 4 LDs. It would be a very sad and atrocious exchange rate for the GA. Who would be left to successfully prosecute the war?

I don't agree, but let's leave the subjective Maths aside. I'd never green-light an operation like that myself, but I could be convinced the MAlign would be insane enough to do it... if they had a reasonable chance of success. I don't think they do, so I don't think it could be greenlit even if they thought the trade-off was good. The failure means Honor and White Haven are still alive, in possession of MAlign hardware, and with a taste for blood. That's the worst possible scenario.

Which I could only see if this is a MAlign desperation move, which in turn implies the MAlign is losing. So if it is losing, why would Honor be herself desperate?

As for who's left? How about Theisman and Tourville? How about Rabenstrage? How about Scotty? How about Terekhov and Oversteegen? How about all the other admirals Honor had with her during the Battle of Galton? There may only be mediocre flag officers left, but if the MAlign has expended itself, it has no one and no ship with which to resist those mediocre officers.

And the GA has nobody strategically and tactically qualified to send to Darius. I will go out on a limb and say that Darius would love to see anyone other than Harrington hypering into Darius.

I seriously doubt it. No one is Honor's equal, but conquering Darius does not require that. I'll make this prediction: the GA has more admirals capable of ending the MAlign than the MAN has LDs.

It may be a costly affair, but it can be done. The moment a fleet hypers in the Darius system, the Darius system's days are over. It's only a matter of time. It can't withstand multiple attack waves while its infrastructure has been obliterated. Kingsford could pick up the pieces and win with his obsolete Scientist-class SDs through brute-force.

It does not matter if the secondary objective of taking out Harrington has been successful.

There's a causal disconnect there. "Has been successful" implies it's already happened. We're discussing the situation before it has happened and whether the LD even execute in the first place. If the chances of success were so great, I wouldn't be discussing; the problem is I don't think they are or can be anything beyond "hail mary pass" which implies the MAlign is losing which invalidates the scenario where Honor is placed in a vulnerable position.

penny wrote:Let's apply your analogy. But apply it correctly.

The piece of paper in this instance would be the thread itself (or the situation) offered up for discussion. Examine the piece of paper -- the premise -- all you want. That is what we all want, to discuss what is at hand. And the piece of paper is at hand.

But you are asking the judge to strike the piece of paper from evidence altogether. Because you disagree how it ended up at point C. The Court room.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Well, yes. Evidence has to be authenticated and its provenance ascertained. Illegally-obtained evidence isn't admissible in court and can't be used for any conclusions (fruit of the poisonous tree).

As ThinksMarkedly points out, evidence can be ruled inadmissible; but that was not where I was going. In fact I find it confusing, since you were the one trying to limit allowable discussion, not I.

You were saying that your premise(s) should not be argued about, only the conclusions that you claim result. I meant that those premises are part of your post (the "paper" to which I was alluding) and so I am allowed to examine them also.

The court in this case is the forum and Duckk is the only Judge. I am allowed to disagree with anything in your post, including how you came to write it. Duckk is the only one who may decide that my argument is inadmissible in the forum.

Outdated equations of attrition have changed


A war of attrition against ones top Strategists and Tacticians could win the war.

Imagine if King, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance, and Mitscher had been assassinated, by hook, crook, or by car. Then we would be speaking Japanese.



"Run cthia run!"

"You better follow me closely penny."

"You move. I move."

penny wrote:Outdated equations of attrition have changed

A war of attrition against ones top Strategists and Tacticians could win the war.

Imagine if King, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance, and Mitscher had been assassinated, by hook, crook, or by car. Then we would be speaking Japanese.

No, there was no chance for the Japanese to win the war after Midway at the latest and only a small chance after Pearl Harbor. Their problem was that they had no way to get to the means of production, so even with the USA fighting on two oceans they could still be overwhelmed.

To a certain extent, Admirals and Generals are overrated because in wartime replacements can often be found. The Battle of Leyte Gulf was won with all the famous names elsewhere (see below). That assumes that the side with the less successful leaders have a materiel advantage. For instance the North could hold out, despite the South having better generals, until Grant and Sherman were in place.

PS: Take a look at the Battle off Samar, commonly known as the Battle of Taffy 3.

penny wrote:Outdated equations of attrition have changed


A war of attrition against ones top Strategists and Tacticians could win the war.

Imagine if King, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance, and Mitscher had been assassinated, by hook, crook, or by car. Then we would be speaking Japanese.

No, no we wouldn't.

The remaining strategists and tacticians wouldn't be so incompetent as the lose the war for the US, not given the ridiculously lopsided industrial output and manpower. It might have lasted a bit longer (though given the atomic bomb it might not have either) but Japan would still lose unless we somehow got a president or congress that decided to abandon the agreements we had with our allies and pull out of the war early. Nothing else could have saved Japan.

And even if the US had somehow lost the war we wouldn't be speaking Japanese because they didn't being to have enough people to actually invade or control the US. At the very worst the US would be humiliated and need to rebuild a navy. It's unlikely Japan had the forces and logistics to even take Hawaii (though that's a popular alternate history subject) -- they had no prayer of taking the west coast; much less pushing through the rockies and into the midwest.

Jonathan_S wrote:The remaining strategists and tacticians wouldn't be so incompetent as the lose the war for the US, not given the ridiculously lopsided industrial output and manpower.

Some numbers to give this context.

Between Dec 7, 1941 and Aug 15, 1945 the countries commissioned:
Battleships: Japan 2 | US 8
Fleet carriers: Japan 7 | US 17
Light carriers: Japan 1 | US 9
Escort carriers: Japan 10 | US 75
Heavy Cruisers: Japan 0 | US 9
Light Cruisers: Japan 8 | US 33
Destroyers: Japan 69 | US 272
Submarines: Japan 110 | US 145
And total aircraft produced: Japan ~85,000 | US ~273,000

Just utterly outproduced.

When the production differential is that lopsided (and there isn't some offsetting tech silver bullet) you don't need a strategic or tactical genus; even average middle of the road leaders can easily achieve victory.