"In Enemy Hands" - different ship.

So, far only one poster in this thread has demonstrated any ability to use rational thought...

84 capital missiles people! Not to mention other ships with MORE capital missiles in pods! Not medium hitting missiles. They still had thousands of medium missiles as well.

Star Knight survive... What a load of...
SAG-C... As a wreck maybe.
Reliant BC would also be a wreck as well.
Nike BCL with keyhole? Yup, it survives.

The rest of you should be embarrassed for your hubris chutzpah regarding absurd postulates. Holy thick rose colored glasses!

I think the thinking is that if a Prince Consort had the seen performance, what would have happened had a better ship been in its position? And, the point isn't whether or not a better ship could have "won" the fight, but whether or not a better ship could have successfully escaped. Sticking it out and fighting would be a rather bad idea for any realistic alternative class of ship.


A Star Knight would presumably have lasted at least a little longer than Prince Adrian did. Enough to get all the way to the hyperlimit? Probably not, and even if it did, it'd probably be in terrible shape, and also probably damaged to the point of being unable to hyper out. If it could hyper out, it'd likely be damaged to the point of replacement.


A Reliant? Well, I'm not sure that the Peeps would have jumped it the way they did Prince Adrian. But again, a Reliant would presumably have lasted longer, perhaps even long enough to get back to the hyper limit and jump out, albeit heavily damaged.

A Sag-C? Actually ... a Sag-C could probably make it back out, albeit damaged. And none of the Peeps that jumped it would have survived, or if any did, they'd be near-scrap. The Sag-C, after all, would be slamming them with heavier missiles moving faster and way better ECM - and can stack its salvos to overpower the defenses. And the Sag-C would have significantly better sidewalls, acceleration, EW, armor, and other defenses. Plus, a Sag-C would have better sensors and recon drones - possibly good enough to spot the Peeps before getting jumped or running into one.
Then too, the Sag-C is big enough that the Peeps might not have jumped one the way they did Prince Adrian.


A Nike? The Peeps almost certainly don't jump it the way they did Prince Adrian at all. The Nike also has lots better everything, and like the Sag-C, its sensors and recon drones might well have spotted the Peeps before they made their move. Even supposing the Peeps jump the Nike the way they jumped Prince Adrian in a fit of mass insanity, they get smashed. And possibly kicked out of the system.

You can't go anywhere in hyper with battle damage to your impellers when the star system in question resides in a Grav wave... Impeller nodes are bare ass naked to damage. Sure, there is armor. No class below at least BC can withstand a capital laser head hit in their impellers without blowing parts of them to bits. Even BC class is highly doubtful.

Somtaaw wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:No. The surrender to Tourville set up the entire book, so Plot required that they be in an untenable solution; even if you upgraded to an Invictus SD(P) the ambush would have to be upgraded to match or there would have been no story.

Except if you upgraded the Prince Adrian to something like an Invictus podnought, uhh.... you can list the total number of systems they'd be ambushed for in on one hand. Manticore Binary, Grayson, Grendlesbane, and Trevor's Star... and to punch out the system defences in those systems.... well Tourville wouldn't have been commanding that.


Which then puts the whole plot into breakdown anyways, because it HAD to be Tourville commanding the ambush, so that he almost gets axed by Randsom, that Foraker turns into a cold-eyed, politically correct (and suspicious) tac witch instead of an oblivious one, and so on and so forth.

Relax wrote:You can't go anywhere in hyper with battle damage to your impellers when the star system in question resides in a Grav wave... Impeller nodes are bare ass naked to damage. Sure, there is armor. No class below at least BC can withstand a capital laser head hit in their impellers without blowing parts of them to bits. Even BC class is highly doubtful.

Battle of Solon. A certain BC ended up trapped in the system. Could as easily have been Honor's flagship with disabled alpha nodes and boat bays. IIRC, its division mate took damage to EW/ECM systems in one of the earlier salvos and when the big stacked one came in, many more went for it rather than the flag.

Relax wrote:You can't go anywhere in hyper with battle damage to your impellers when the star system in question resides in a Grav wave... Impeller nodes are bare ass naked to damage. Sure, there is armor. No class below at least BC can withstand a capital laser head hit in their impellers without blowing parts of them to bits. Even BC class is highly doubtful.

Entirely true ... but hits aren't automatically going to get the impeller rings in such a way that damage control can't patch things enough to get away. It all depends on the hit(s) taken.
For that matter, hits aren't guaranteed to get the alpha nodes at all.

If your alpha nodes do get hit in that situation, yeah, you're screwed.
But a better ship might have been able to stop the missile that caused irreparable alpha node damage. That's the main point, I think.


And, technically, you can still jump out with a grav wave, you just have to turn your wedge off, and not run into a disturbance in the grav wave before getting out of it (depending on the wave, that could mean changing hyper bands or needing to leave hyper altogether). Which is a risk that nobody's really going to run, and so the theoretical possibility should be discounted.

If we're talking about just dropping in a Sag-C with no other changes in the scenario, then it's going to come home for a number of reasons:

1. They localized Katana (the CA with the pods) long before they got into missile range. They could simply blow it out of space before getting into the Peep's range. Coupled with the Sag-C's higher accel, they could destroy the Katana, avoid Nuada's missile envelope (or just blow her up too), then leisurely leave the system without the Peeps able to fire a shot in return.

2. Even supposing - for the sake of argument - that they couldn't use the extended range of the Mk-16 and had to engage from single drive range, her defenses are above and beyond anything Prince Adrian mounted. She would have had more point defense stations (CM and PDLC alike), better point defense stations, tougher sidewalls and armor, 10-ish years of Ghost Rider electronic warfare improvements, and simple sheer bulk. A couple of laser heads might get through all those aggregate defenses, but the end result would be a mildly injured Sag-C, fully capable of fighting its way clear (barring a golden BB).

2a. Additionally, while Prince Adrian took nine laser heads to the broadsides, she also received four lasers heads down the throat. It was these hits that lamed the ship, not the other nine. A Sag-C would have had either the buckler or the full bowwall up, mitigating the damage (assuming that those missiles even make it through the defenses in this scenario).

3. While the pods Katana fired were packed with capital missiles, they shouldn't be overestimated either. They are early 1910s missiles, and Peep ones at that. While not anemic by any measure, they're also not as deadly as what the Havenites were throwing in the second war, let alone what Manticore had - and designing their ships to encounter and survive.

In short, a Sag-C almost certainly would walk away from this one with only mild damage.

Duckk wrote:If we're talking about just dropping in a Sag-C with no other changes in the scenario, then it's going to come home for a number of reasons:

[...]

A Sag-B might be a more interesting exercise. I suspect a Sag-B gets out, but it's a much more close-run thing. A Sag-A, though, probably doesn't.

Duckk wrote:...snipped to save scroll wheels...
2a. Additionally, while Prince Adrian took nine laser heads to the broadsides, she also received four lasers heads down the throat. It was these hits that lamed the ship, not the other nine. A Sag-C would have had either the buckler or the full bowwall up, mitigating the damage (assuming that those missiles even make it through the defenses in this scenario).

...snip...

Thank you Duckk for a more clear cummunication of the point I was trying to make. Yeah, I was too lazy to look the specifics up.

Thanks again,
T2M

Duckk wrote:If we're talking about just dropping in a Sag-C with no other changes in the scenario, then it's going to come home for a number of reasons:

1. They localized Katana (the CA with the pods) long before they got into missile range. They could simply blow it out of space before getting into the Peep's range. Coupled with the Sag-C's higher accel, they could destroy the Katana, avoid Nuada's missile envelope (or just blow her up too), then leisurely leave the system without the Peeps able to fire a shot in return.

I'd like to nitpick here and say that Honor/McKeon only localized Katana a few minutes before the launch was going to happen. They had just enough time to roll ship in preparation for the anticipated 'possible pods' threat, give or take a few minutes before PNS Katana launched. If they'd had any more warning, they may have gone ahead and adjusted course to close with Nuada and stay entirely away from Katana. They knew the Sword was older, and how powerful her wedge could be (thus lacking pods), and they also knew they hadn't ever even heard of the Mars-class Katana (or how powerful their wedges were) for the possible pod load, so they tried to balance the threats of known versus unknown.

So even a Star Knight would have had a considerably better chance, simply because if they'd had those better sensors to burn through Katana's stealth earlier, they would have had even more time to see exactly how many pods she was towing, and to just go "oh hell no". It was the purely defensive stance of "lets try to blitz our way through and take whatever fire we need to hyper out" is what truly screwed the Prince Adrian, when they should have gone to full avoid the total unknown and take our chances in a closer range engagment with somebody we absolutely know we can take

The second and third battles of Adler took place late 1911.

Both the RMN and GSN had the lead ship of their Saganami/Adrian class commissioned in 1908. However, it wasn't until Flight II that bow walls(stern walls didn't come until the -B) became part of their design. No date is given for commencement of Flight II(my guess is ~1913).

The first Saganami-class had twice the point defense and countermissile capability of a Prince Consort, along with tougher armour(the RMN started using new materials around 1905).