Battle of Manticore

munroburton wrote:Peep, not Havenite. I think kzt is talking about the first Havenite war.

Indeed, it's one of the major discontinuities in the HV, IMO. SLN doctrine has been established as "Attack the enemy's capital with the heaviest force you can muster, then deal with any other systems - if they still resist." Given that the SLN provided the starting template for most star navies, I'm curious as to why the People's Navy abandoned that doctrine, particularly as it should have worked excellently for their conquests up to that point.

To win, the Hereditary President needed to control Haven, Trevor's Star and Manticore. Any systems raided or seized by remaining RMN fleet elements are of no consequence in the long run, as once the MBS shipyards are gone, the RMN's expansion is immediately halted.

Yup. Previously the Peeps had rolled over single star system polities by directly striking at the system. Fundamentally, at the start of SVW the Manticore Alliance, was a one system Polity. The RMN had something like 90% of the firepower and Manticore had something like 90% of the ship building capability.

A few years into the war there were multiple heavy ship building centers (Grayson & Talbot, at least) but at the start everyone else could only build at most BCs.

However it would have been a pretty short series....

kzt wrote:Yup. Previously the Peeps had rolled over single star system polities by directly striking at the system. ...

That is part of the answer: The Legislaturist RHN didn't know how to attack an Alliance.

They chose to treat major allies, like Grayson, as separate systems to conquer before taking on Manticore. Unfortunately, Grayson seems to be a black hole where Peep/Havenite task forces go to die.

cthia wrote:In the simple game of Stratego you must protect your flag. If you forward deploy your main assets then you are toast if/when the enemy penetrates your line and places you in a pickle of a jam. I don't like pickle and jam on toast.

You should see how my cousin plays Stratego.

He is exceptionally annoying, as he wins a lot more than he looses, and you NEVER know where his flag or bombs are, he has a penchant for placing the flag up front, and getting away with it by making the opponent think its a bomb, and having a middling to powerful piece not too far away scaring off any attempts at getting close with zappers(or blatantly staying away from the area himself as well(or using the area as his main axis of attack))...


And having learned from him, when i play nowadays, i always vary how i place my flag, including sometimes placing it up front.

And getting away with it more often than not!

But i certainly prefer to be a weee bit less chancy with things. I once lost to an opponents first move in a game because of it, even though it was completely random bad luck, it still can happen when you take a chance like that.


Hmm, now what was the topic again?

Tenshinai wrote:

cthia wrote:In the simple game of Stratego you must protect your flag. If you forward deploy your main assets then you are toast if/when the enemy penetrates your line and places you in a pickle of a jam. I don't like pickle and jam on toast.

You should see how my cousin plays Stratego.

He is exceptionally annoying, as he wins a lot more than he looses, and you NEVER know where his flag or bombs are, he has a penchant for placing the flag up front, and getting away with it by making the opponent think its a bomb, and having a middling to powerful piece not too far away scaring off any attempts at getting close with zappers(or blatantly staying away from the area himself as well(or using the area as his main axis of attack))...


And having learned from him, when i play nowadays, i always vary how i place my flag, including sometimes placing it up front.

And getting away with it more often than not!

But i certainly prefer to be a weee bit less chancy with things. I once lost to an opponents first move in a game because of it, even though it was completely random bad luck, it still can happen when you take a chance like that.


Hmm, now what was the topic again?

Yeah i play Stratego a lot like your cousin does. What was hilarious was last week when I was playing one of my cousins. I deployed my flag to my back right corner because I knew he would never, ever think that I would put my flag there.

Tenshinai wrote:

cthia wrote:In the simple game of Stratego you must protect your flag. If you forward deploy your main assets then you are toast if/when the enemy penetrates your line and places you in a pickle of a jam. I don't like pickle and jam on toast.

You should see how my cousin plays Stratego.

He is exceptionally annoying, as he wins a lot more than he looses, and you NEVER know where his flag or bombs are, he has a penchant for placing the flag up front, and getting away with it by making the opponent think its a bomb, and having a middling to powerful piece not too far away scaring off any attempts at getting close with zappers(or blatantly staying away from the area himself as well(or using the area as his main axis of attack))...


And having learned from him, when i play nowadays, i always vary how i place my flag, including sometimes placing it up front.

And getting away with it more often than not!

But i certainly prefer to be a weee bit less chancy with things. I once lost to an opponents first move in a game because of it, even though it was completely random bad luck, it still can happen when you take a chance like that.


Hmm, now what was the topic again?

I didn't know there was like a fool's mate in Stratego!

****** *

Regarding the Battle of Manticore. If Eighth Fleet would have been home when Haven came a-knocking, the RMN could have been given a wedgie( ) even if they had been in-system, yet out of position, if the RHN had hypered in on top of them. It's called, stepping inside a boxer's longer reach.

cthia wrote:The Battle of Manticore has always puzzled me. If the cavalry hadn't arrived, in the form of one Sally Mander, Manticore's goose would have been stuffed with their chestnuts and cooked. Yet, Harrington had those godawful battle changing missiles. Now I know there was a production bottleneck resulting in a limited supply. What puzzles me is the decision to deploy all of the missiles aboard Honor's ship. All?! It just seems to me that the first consideration should have been the Home System. Now, McKeon had a few, but the Home System and Home Fleet had none? Do you not protect your Queen first?

In the simple game of Stratego you must protect your flag. If you forward deploy your main assets then you are toast if/when the enemy penetrates your line and places you in a pickle of a jam. I don't like pickle and jam on toast. In chess, you hold back your rooks to protect your rear. I am simply saying, the decision to forward deploy all of the missiles could have been the wrong decision. Would have been. Almost was.

Others have already pointed out why Honor got Apollo first, and linked to RFC's pearl on it.

In perfect hindsight, knowing exactly how effective Apollo is and that it might push Haven into an all or nothing assault, you could argue that it would have worked better to give those each unit back to Home Fleet, or 3rd Fleet (covering Trevor's Star) at (say) a 3 or 4 to one exchange ratio. That would increase Honor's raiding power without as much risk of panicking Haven.

Of course the counter argument to that is that the Keyhole II equipped SD(P)s were also the most survivabile ones, and the (few) Keyhole Is were a close second. But they're also the ones you'd want to throw into the yards for conversion to Keyhole II. So Honor is likely to be getting 1st Gen SD(P)s which are significantly less survivable on a one-on-one basis than the Invictus-class SD(P)s she started with. So despite the higher numbers she still somewhat more likely to take major losses if she gets mousetrapped again.


But Manticore had been dealt a losing hand by Janecek and basically had to bluff to pull off an upset win. If you'd held the Apollo units at Manticore and Haven got tired of the raiding they had sufficient forces to take back pretty much everything short of that (unless you heavily committed Home Fleet to holding Trevor's Star)
Heck as others have pointed out, their starting hand was so bad that if Theisman and Pritchart had gone for the knockout punch and send an near Beatrice level raid for the resumption of hostilities the entire Manticore fleet, plus everything Grayson could spare (prior to Apollo), wouldn't have been enough to save the home system. They effectively had no way to fully protect it; they had to rely on Haven not wanting to pay the butchers bill for a knockout blow.

(Of course until a few exchanges of arms had happened nobody, including Manticore, had a solid baseline for how SD(P) to SD(P) combat, MDM to MDM, would actually work out. Nor how well Haven's new designs stacked up the Manticore and Graysons various classes. So opening with war with a Beatrice raid was more of a blind gamble; if Theisman was wrong about how much of the effectiveness gap Bolthole had closed... Ouch)

I think it also needed to be pointed out that at the beginning of the war Haven really wasn't wanting a complete knock-out punch on Manticore. Their goal wasn't conquest. It was to destroy enough of Manticore's modern fleet to force Manticore to negotiate in good faith. Secondly it was to get their occupied systems back at least long enough to determine by plebicite whether or not those systems wished to remain in the Republic.

Hence Thunderbolt which only partly succeeded. They did retake everything but Trevor's Star. But with the failures at Marsh and Trevor's Star, combined with Grayson and the Andermani, Manticore managed to stay in the game, even with what happened at Grendlesbane.

Don

Dafmeister wrote:

BobfromSydney wrote:I just wanted to double check a question I had brought up in an earlier thread:

So D'Orville, Kuzak et al did not fire the system defense pods deployed around planetary orbit because they were worried about retaliatory fire hitting the planets.
Okay, I'll accept that.

Why didn't the defense planners for the Manticore system deploy the pods away from the planets (maybe at a nearby Lagrange point)?

That way the pods - which would only be used in the event of a major attack on the Manticore System - would be ready to fire without concerns about accidental Eridani violations from return fire.

On the other hand, if it was not reasonable to assume there was any possibility of such a problem, them why did the fleet commanders decline to use every resource at their disposal?

I think at least part of the problem is light-speed lag - if the pods are separated from the control facility, there will be a significant delay while the launch signal travels to the pods. To avoid that you have to keep a control platform close to a pod cluster. If the control platform is positioned in a different orbit than the thing it's defending, it'll orbit at a different rate so their positions will diverge. That means you need multiple platforms covering the whole of the defended object's orbit, which disperses your firepower.

This is all pre-Apollo of course. Once Mycroft is up and running, you can use FTL fire-control to coordinate multiple pod clusters launching timed salvos to converge on the target from multiple vectors at the same time... Good luck rolling ship to interpose the wedge against that.

Okay, so just for reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point

The L2 points would probably give enough separation (a few light seconds) from Manticore and Sphinx (or Gryphon, I suppose) that unless the incoming force arriving in a precise line between the planet and the sun (Manticore A) then it would be safe to fire without worrying about retaliatory fire pasting the planet. It also wouldn't be difficult to 'scramble' a few hundred LACs, or a couple of destroyer flotilla's (older models, not Rolands) to assist the block ships in protecting the planets.

Keep in mind that even if the attacking force arrives in an exact line with one planet, unless there is a confluence of the planets and the planets are on the exact same orbital plane, then it is not possible for all the 'orbital' pods to be out of action at the same time.

For maintenance of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of pods you'd have there you could put a bunch of fortresses and 'workshop' space stations. Or you could just operate out of planetary orbit and 'eat' the travel time.

I am not quite as whiney as KZT, but while I really enjoyed AAC, the BoM was illogical.

The number of FTL comm FC channels demonstrated by Yanakov and McKeanon seemed reasonable given how bulky FTL comm is supposed to be. The tidal wave that HH then unleashed was the epitome of Deux Machina plot. All Weberhad todotomake that aspect of BoM credible is have Honor wait until Chin was inside the hyper limit then annihilate herewith repeated salvos of quadruple stacked Apollo pods. Home Fleet seemed to screw up by the numbers, but given the context of how the fleet at Zanzibar was defeated it was a plausible judgement call.

kzt wrote:I"m one of the biggest whiners about BoM, and I'll say that David's explanation for Apollo deployment and revelation seems perfectly reasonable.

The idea that Haven would throw essentially their entire fleet at Manticore was not considered significantly probable (or they would have kept 8th fleet on the right side of the WHJ, as well as made other adjustments.) So while home fleet made some rather puzzling choices in how to fight, the fact that they didn't have Apollo isn't one. If they did have (even without FTL control) they would have pretty much obliterated 2nd fleet, though they would have still been crushed by the return fire. That wouldn't have made a very good book, now would it have?

Essentially Haven managed to hit at a very good point in time for them, but not one quite good enough. If they had waited a week or three, until 8th was on another raid, then things would have been very bad. Another few months and Apollo would have been on the fortresses and 8th would be about to drop in on Haven.

namelessfly wrote:All Weberhad todotomake that aspect of BoM credible is have Honor wait until Chin was inside the hyper limit then annihilate herewith repeated salvos of quadruple stacked Apollo pods. Home Fleet seemed to screw up by the numbers, but given the context of how the fleet at Zanzibar was defeated it was a plausible judgement call.

I'm not at all certain that 5th would have entered the hyperlimit. 2nd was perfectly capable of crushing what was left of the defences. At bast I'd expect that 5th would go to Manticore B and "open negotiations" there.

The assumption by HH that 5th wouldn't hyper out seems really odd. Chin had already blowed up 3rd, so her work was done, and she knew this new fleet almost had to be 8th. She knew that 8th had Apollo, she just didn't know how much or what range. She also had just seen 8th fire off half their ammo from crazy long, range, which seems very odd given that all the other RMN units had closed to less than 50% of max powered range before shooting.

It all seems very suspicious. So why hang around instead of hyper jumping either closer into 8th or to either Manticore B or just the other side of Manticore A? Or just crossing the wall for a few minutes until the missiles are gone?

Plus the whole idea that the missiles can't find 5th seems odd. It's not like 5th is hard to see on a grav sensor, and IIRC, the command loop time is still short enough to make it work by simply telling the missiles where to start looking for 5th and the search algorithm to use.