Vince wrote:kzt wrote:Space is big. Very very big. Let's say I have each pod 10,000 km away from each other pod. I can have a million pods in a million km^3 space. To deliver significant energy to something at 10,000 km away involves truely enormous warheads. And you can stop this with the kind of boring anti-radiation screens that are trivial in the honorverse and are possessed by every little runabout.
This assumes you don't simply put a few thousand LACs in front of the pods and kill the attack missiles with CMs and PDLCs, since if I'm wiling to build, deploy and maintain a million missile pods I probably did other obvious defensive things too, and it's really hard to launch a million attack missiles without taking some significant amount of time.
In real life, yes. But pods in the
Honorverse are subject to soft kills.
Considering that the attacker is bringing both their platforms and missile reloads (supply train) across a journey of many light years even if it costs them just one missile to take out 4 or 8 of yours the rate of exchange is acceptable, since their 'quiver' is smaller than yours. At the end of the day the platforms and infrastructure matter more than the missiles. As long as you retain both platforms and infrastructure (or have an acceptable rate of exchange on platforms) if you can force the attackers to retreat you can count it as a victory.
For this reason I think the defending mobile forces should preferentially fire the pre-positioned pods rather than their internal ammo. As long as the attacking force has to keep expending ammo to 'honour' the threat of the pods, they are reducing the potential fire that can be directed against the defender's platforms. Although there are some interesting tricks that can be played using technology like the donkeys, I think that ultimately the attacker is not going to win a battle of 'ammo attrition' against a defender located in heart of it's manufacturing and logistics network.
Keep in mind that missiles in the Honorverse are not entirely fire-and-forget. If the fire control disappears they are much more vulnerable to EW, Countermeasures and Point Defense (CMs and Laser clusters).
Also if the 'attack' (anti-pod) missiles are sent in Ballistic then they themselves are ALSO vulnerable to soft kills, there is no reason why the defender couldn't attempt a 'triple ripple' to take out the majority of the attack missiles and then just destroy the rest with point defense.
The type of battle tactics you are suggesting seem to me to depend on just one question:
Defender missile flight time vs. attacker hyperdrive cycle time. This depends on how far from the pod 'stack' the attacker hypers in. Too close and they will get pasted. Too far and maybe your missiles are less effective.
The defender will probably scramble a couple of destroyer flotillas (or a few BatCruRons) into the alpha bands in order to keep track of the location of the attacker's fleet.
Since the defender has more missiles and far far more LACs, it will be hard for the attacker to keep any eyes in real space for long.
SWM wrote:The L2 point is unstable. Unlike the L4 and L5 points, if you are not very exactly on the L2 point you will inexorably drift away from it. An array of pods placed around the L2 point would scatter within months.
There are only 2 reasons to keep the pods near the planets in the first place. Otherwise doing so is entirely inexcusable.
Reason 1: The pods need a lot of mothering, maintenance and monthly check-ups: refuels and hand-holding. Keeping them near the planets makes servicing the pods more efficient.
Reason 2: You are using planetary (or orbital) fire control facilities to fire the pods.
If Reason 1 is true, then all those pods will be receiving regular visits anyway. No reason why they couldn't also get a helpful tractor assisted nudge when that happens.
Reason 2 doesn't seem relevant to this issue.
