OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Are you sure? None of those salvos would have been as big and as effective as his actual first one. Yes, they would have prevented the donkeying, but we've concluded D'Orville didn't know about them (though he should have scouted). Without the need to prevent donkeying, would Home Fleet's actions still be justified?

You're missing this. He had enough pods to throw that many salvos as big as the ones he did throw, and simply chose not to use them.

Galactic Sapper wrote:You're missing this. He had enough pods to throw that many salvos as big as the ones he did throw, and simply chose not to use them.

Exactly. He had the ammo and fire control to throw TWENTY-SEVEN Avalanche salvos. He was predicting that he'd have time to fire about 12. He actually fired 7 (or 12,600 pods), with the vast majority of his 49,000 pods last seen heading out into deep space at 20,000 km/sec with the rest of the wreckage of home fleet.

Edit: I said 35 earlier, it's only 27. So Home has enough ammo to continually fire Avalanche size salvos for 29 minutes.

With a time of flight conservatively estimated at 12 minutes due to the mid-range unpowered segment that means Home fleet has fired almost 20,000 of the 28,000 externally mounted pods, and after another 4 minutes all the externally mounted pods are used. So you can shoot the pods instead of abandoning them.

Exactly what this means to the Haven missile salvos is unclear. By 100M km I think Haven had started the donkey deployment. So 2nd can deploy and fire the donkey-scale missile salvos, but they fired 5 salvos and used up 60% of their ammo destroying home feet.

If the chose to not fire the pods on the donkeys get destroyed. So they have to fire them from far out of effective range or write off 60% of their total ammo.

I would assume that 2nd didn't have anything other then those 5 salvos deployed or they would have been destroyed. Anyhow, at this point 2nd has to go to much smaller salvos, presumably 12 pods per ship.

In addition, after those 5 salvos go out and hammer Home Fleet they have about 314,000 more missiles (minus those ships that get blown up of f-killed). [Note it takes about 8,000 Haven missiles to kill a RMN SD(P)]. So how long do they want to keep firing given the very long time of flight? They go through 10% of their ammo every minute, so in theory they could shoot themselves dry and then watch Home blow up with all their remaining 300,000 missiles still flying towards it.

kzt wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:You're missing this. He had enough pods to throw that many salvos as big as the ones he did throw, and simply chose not to use them.

Exactly. He had the ammo and fire control to throw TWENTY-SEVEN Avalanche salvos. He was predicting that he'd have time to fire about 12. He actually fired 7 (or 12,600 pods), with the vast majority of his 49,000 pods last seen heading out into deep space at 20,000 km/sec with the rest of the wreckage of home fleet.

Those numbers sound way too large at first, but could be right. Let's see if it's mathematically possible. You wrote below 28000 externally-mounted pods. With 90 wallers to tractor onto, we get a average of 300 per ship. Is that feasible? I'm completely ignoring the 12 BC(P)s here, they're a rounding error.

I'd say it's in the order of magnitude of possible. 30 would be too few and 3000 per ship would be unbelievable. It also matches your numbers below.

Anyway, what you're both telling me is that he had more pods tractored to the hulls of the SDs than he had control links for anyway, so any salvo where Home Fleet was still controlling the missiles would not exhaust the ammo anyway. And that he could fire 27 maximum salvos.

The time between the last few salvos might have been longer, though, but probably not enough to make a difference. My thinking is that the SD(P)s are rolling pods from internal storage while everyone using the external ones. After that, everyone is using those rolled pods. But I guess you fire more than you can roll, so at some point you catch up to what's being rolled.

Edit: I said 35 earlier, it's only 27. So Home has enough ammo to continually fire Avalanche size salvos for 29 minutes.

With a time of flight conservatively estimated at 12 minutes due to the mid-range unpowered segment that means Home fleet has fired almost 20,000 of the 28,000 externally mounted pods, and after another 4 minutes all the externally mounted pods are used. So you can shoot the pods instead of abandoning them.

Could D'Orville have thought he could get through the 3200 LACs and destroy a sufficient fraction of the 240 SD(P)s with those 12 salvos, and that his fleet would be mostly intact after the exchange? On one hand, the number of missiles would say so. From your numbers, each salvo consisted of 1800 pods (20 per ship), which is 21600 missiles if those are 12-missile pods. If he needed to destroy or cripple 240 wallers in 12 salvos, it means 20 wallers per salvo or 1080 missiles per SD.

In actual fact, the 7 salvos totalled 151,200 missiles and destroyed 97 SD(P)s, crippling 19 more. That's an average of 1303 missiles per mission-kill. So my calculation is not too far off. If he had fired all 12 salvos he expected to, an increase of 71% against a depleted enemy, we could expect Second fleet to have become mission-ineffective.

The second aspect of the reasoning would be whether his fleet would be reasonably intact after this exchange. If he couldn't expect it, then there's no point in holding back. As you've both pointed out, the more missiles flying the better. And besides, you don't want to rely on luck, you go for the overkill. So could he have thought he'd have survived? From the Battle of Lovat, we know 6 Sovereigns of Space fired 1152 missiles per salvo and Task Force 82 consisting of 2 Invictus-class easily parried such salvos off. Even a combined 11000 missile salvo failed to mission-kill both SD(P)s then. Against 240 Sovereigns of Space, one would expect a normal launch of 46080 missiles, to be defended by 90 SDs, or 512 missiles per ship on average. Even if the weight of defence was on the SD(P)s, we're talking 1097 missiles per ship on average. And I think the Harrigtons and Medusas are comparable in defence to the Invictus.

The problem here is that these margins are razor-thin. And that D'Orville had to be counting on Second Fleet not having rolled pods and firing a much bigger salvos that could and would overwhelm his defences. So it was irresponsible not to fire earlier. If 12 salvos were thought to be sufficient and you have the ammo to spare, plus reinforcements coming, fire 18 or 24 salvos.

I don't think that's possible he thought he'd survive with most of his fleet intact. At 2.5:1 odds, Havenite and Manticoran hardware is just about equally matched, so he ought to have expected to lose a significant chunk of it. The insight into his thinking reveals he did expect that to happen. And if you can't guarantee that your enemy is obliterated and you're mostly intact after the exchange, there's no point in holding ammo back.

In addition, after those 5 salvos go out and hammer Home Fleet they have about 314,000 more missiles (minus those ships that get blown up of f-killed). [Note it takes about 8,000 Haven missiles to kill a RMN SD(P)]. So how long do they want to keep firing given the very long time of flight? They go through 10% of their ammo every minute, so in theory they could shoot themselves dry and then watch Home blow up with all their remaining 300,000 missiles still flying towards it.

Where did you get the 8000 missile number? From the Battle of Lovat, we know the Alliance allocated 144 Apollo pods per ship, or 1152 missiles (not counting the control one) and the RHN defences stopped less than a third of that (700 out of a 2304 salvo). Granted, those were Apollo. But what we saw from the actual engagement in Manticore was that the 7 salvos of 21600 missiles (151,200) killed 97 RHN SD(P)s and crippled 19 more, only 1303 missiles per mission-kill.

Jonathan_S wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:The only place they exist where there is a battle is Beowulf and Manticore--and at Manticore we never saw what was fired. Other than that, they did their job by existing--nobody would attack such a system.

Well we saw several Havenite systems fire their shoals of system defense pods at Honor's 8th fleet. And even at the end of the first war Barnett-base was hoping to use their SDM pods against White Haven's fleet (too bad he had MDMs and never entered their range)

We also saw the pre-Apollo RMN ones used when Zanzibar's Admiral al-Bakr (foolishly) ordered the use of that system's outer system defenses to engage the Peep recon sweep. Those were system defense pods and LAC bases scattered through their asteroid belt.

And at Monica Hexapuma and the scratch squadron got surprised by Technodyne's ERM based system defense pods.

At Beowolf we did see the Apollo missile defense pods fire - that's what Silver Bullet tried (with limited success) to cripple by taking out the Mycroft control relays.

At Manticore we didn't see them fire - they hadn't yet been upgraded to the 4-drive Apollo system defense pods w/ Mycroft. The Admiralty wasn't willing to fire the ones under control of Sphynx's forts for fear of drawing return fire at the planet. I'm not sure why Manticore didn't seem to have scattered outer system emplacements like Zanzibar did -- those could have been fired without worrying about where the return fire would go.

At Sol I'd guess that they just didn't have enough Cataphract pods yet to divert any from the active fleet forces to deploy in static defenses. (Also the Cataphract pods they had may not be capable of long endurance deployed; the League might not have had time to design and produce a specific system defense variant)


So we've actually seen system defense pods used a number of times. They'e just rarely enough, on their own, to actually stop an attacker. They 'merely' inflict attritional damage -- though threat of them does drive how much force an attacker much come up with before risking an attack on a system containing them.

Hoooooly foot in the mouth, Batman. One thing about the SI system, one should 'never go hungry again,' with plenty feet to eat. I don't recall a single time the system defense pods were fired. My first read through was for substance. So was my second and third -- call it greed for the same excitement from the cavalry charge. Hey, it's addicting! You can bet any subsequent rereads will have APBs attached.

Thanks Jonathan. I don't suppose I missed Forts, even a single Fort, firing too?

Galactic Sapper wrote:

cthia wrote:I thought so too, but when I consider that Beatrice was formulated to kill Eighth Fleet, and that it was Theisman's plan, what gives? Theisman is one of the best strategists Haven's got. And he knew Eighth Fleet had, 'whatever those god-awful missiles are called.' But hopefully only Eighth Fleet. It was mostly true.

Anyways, why did RFC have me biting my nails hoping Honor wouldn't jump the gun, allowing the Havenites to spring the trap?

RFC had us, me anyways, thinking the Salamander's sixth sense saved her again.

Basically, if Eighth Fleet had come through with Third Fleet and gotten mousetrapped the same way, it would have been a battle of mutual annihilation much the same way Hypatia was. Eighth Fleet wouldn't have had the time to get nearly as many pods onto their hulls, so a one-launch knockout wouldn't have been possible. The first launch would have been big but not decisive.

After that the battle would play out as it did. Third/Eighth and Fifth Fleets would chew massive holes in each other until 5th fleet lost the range (assuming they lasted that long). The end result would be a badly mauled Third/Eighth facing off against the badly mauled Second Fleet, with Eighth Fleet's survivors being short enough on Apollo pods to prevent a super long range sniping battle. At that point the only thing that could have stopped Second Fleet would be the arrival of the Lynx, Basilisk, and Gryphon pickets, none of which had the podnoughts needed to take out a significant fleet, and the system defense pods at Sphynx, which could do the job if they dared fire them.

Of course, at every stage there could be a ton of plot armor and authorial fiat - for example if all of the Apollo ships got knocked out, or none of them.

This is pretty much the analysis I was searching for, in my attempt to measure Theisman's tactical prowess. Thanks Galactic Sapper.

Would Honor have rushed entering the system w/o rolling the same number of pods even if she had jumped in with Third?

At the end of my first read, I also wondered what would have happened if Eighth Fleet was already in-system when the Peeps jumped in. In orbit. It's simply hard to swallow that Honor could have been taken out while she had all of that firepower, depending on her bearing in-system. And, there was no way for Theisman to know Eighth Fleet's location at the moment of attack.

How long does it take for a podnaught to fill it's hull with pods? And, of course, pods can be rolled under max power since they are being tractored to the hull inside the wedge?

The 8000 missiles per SD(P) comes from the period where second fleet is destroying 3rd fleet with salvos of 12,000 missiles. Each salvo kills 1-2 SD(P)s.

We haven’t even gotten to the idiocy that allowed 2nd fleet to get to effectce range of 3rd without being mostly reduced to scrap by the handful of Apollo armed ships Kuzak had. Or why Kuzak didn’t plan to engage in combat by doing any pre-battle preperation. Like say rolling pods.

kzt wrote:The 8000 missiles per SD(P) comes from the period where second fleet is destroying 3rd fleet with salvos of 12,000 missiles. Each salvo kills 1-2 SD(P)s.

We haven’t even gotten to the idiocy that allowed 2nd fleet to get to effectce range of 3rd without being mostly reduced to scrap by the handful of Apollo armed ships Kuzak had. Or why Kuzak didn’t plan to engage in combat by doing any pre-battle preperation. Like say rolling pods.

As some NAMELESSFLY once pointed out on this forum, Theodosa Kuzak is a slut. When Haven attacked, Admiral Kuzak was engaged in some slutty activity with a platoon of marines. She needed time for the blood flow to her brain to be restored.

kzt wrote:With a time of flight conservatively estimated at 12 minutes due to the mid-range unpowered segment that means Home fleet has fired almost 20,000 of the 28,000 externally mounted pods, and after another 4 minutes all the externally mounted pods are used. So you can shoot the pods instead of abandoning them.

Huh? At that time I think the only missile capable of a ballistic component was Apollo. And note that without the FTL control accuracy at that range would be abysmal even if the missile could do it.

cthia wrote:Would Honor have rushed entering the system w/o rolling the same number of pods even if she had jumped in with Third?

Possibly. She wouldn't have been in command, Kusak was senior to her. So it depends on how persuasive she could be and how reasonable Kusak was.

At the end of my first read, I also wondered what would have happened if Eighth Fleet was already in-system when the Peeps jumped in. In orbit. It's simply hard to swallow that Honor could have been taken out while she had all of that firepower, depending on her bearing in-system. And, there was no way for Theisman to know Eighth Fleet's location at the moment of attack.

If 8th fleet had been in the Manticore system when 2nd fleet arrived, it would have eaten 2nd fleet alive had it been foolish enough to cross the hyper limit. Half its pod load was enough to crush a fleet half the size of 2nd fleet, so two launches of that size would have pretty well ended 2nd fleet. Any survivors of 2nd fleet would have then been run down by an intact, fully ammuntioned Home Fleet, and that would have been that.

5th fleet would not have jumped in at all, given an intact Home Fleet and the threat of 3rd fleet coming through from Trevor's Star.

How long does it take for a podnaught to fill it's hull with pods? And, of course, pods can be rolled under max power since they are being tractored to the hull inside the wedge?

At 6 pods per 12 seconds, even an Invictus can roll its entire pod supply in about 40 minutes. Presumably, loading them onto the hull takes several times as long, as the ship's tractors moving them up the hull into position would be the rate limiting step. The tractor on the pod itself seems to be a simple station keeping measure and is not itself capable of "walking" up the hull into position on its own. At BoM, 8th fleet was two hours out from the terminus and still didn't have half their pods on the hull. Whether that reflects the physical limits of the process or was the result of some other limitation we can't really know.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Those numbers sound way too large at first, but could be right. Let's see if it's mathematically possible. You wrote below 28000 externally-mounted pods. With 90 wallers to tractor onto, we get a average of 300 per ship. Is that feasible? I'm completely ignoring the 12 BC(P)s here, they're a rounding error.

I'd say it's in the order of magnitude of possible. 30 would be too few and 3000 per ship would be unbelievable. It also matches your numbers below.

With the exception that those pods were tractored to the pre-pod SDs only and not the SD(P)s, correct. "Almost 600" is what is in the text.

The time between the last few salvos might have been longer, though, but probably not enough to make a difference. My thinking is that the SD(P)s are rolling pods from internal storage while everyone using the external ones. After that, everyone is using those rolled pods. But I guess you fire more than you can roll, so at some point you catch up to what's being rolled.

Incorrect. All of the salvos he launched came exclusively from the external pods, as he was launching them far faster than his SD(P)s could roll them. He was launching 100 pods per ship per 65 seconds and could have only rolled 30 pods per SD(P) in that time. The salvo limit I specified earlier was based SOLELY on the external pods and would have left Home Fleet with full internal pods on its SD(P)s and full SDM magazines on its conventional SDs (for what those would be worth). After the external pods were gone he'd have been limited to 1260 missile launches per minute (plus any BC(P)s he had loaded with MDMs and not DDMs).

Could D'Orville have thought he could get through the 3200 LACs and destroy a sufficient fraction of the 240 SD(P)s with those 12 salvos, and that his fleet would be mostly intact after the exchange?

Probably not, but then he wasn't expecting to survive regardless of what he did. He was planning a battle of "take as many of them with us as possible" and just did rather poorly at it.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Huh? At that time I think the only missile capable of a ballistic component was Apollo. And note that without the FTL control accuracy at that range would be abysmal even if the missile could do it.

No, all MDMs and DDMs are capable of ballistic extended flights; it was even one of the selling points in the original designs as presented by Honor in IEH.

The accuracy aspect is significant, though. Even with the pseudo-FTL fire control afforded by FTL recon drones and light speed links to the missiles, the accuracy would have been below what could be expected for missiles launched at closer range. It still would have been significantly better than zero, which was the alternative d'Orville actually got.

(edited to prevent triple posting)