OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

omg this debate is still going?

Wholeheartedly agree on complacency. Finally, someone gets it

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http://davidweber.net/forums/viewtopic. ... 9&start=20

But not at round 2 of BoM. Nobody was complacent after seeing home fleet blowed up. And the things that Kuzak did wrong are numerous, the LAC positioning and pod deployment aren’t really things that you get ordered to do, they are battle drill. You just do them. They are scripted tactics.

The LACs are not going to wait until you are under fire to move out to provide the outer mussile defense zone. They only have maybe 25% more acceleration that the fleet and they have to be several million KM out front to do the job. So they need to get going before you are in range, not when missiles are 7 minutes from impact.

munroburton wrote:Hamish Alexander, supposedly their most stellar flag officer at one point, could not recognise the potential of podlaying SDs + MDMs when he first saw the proposal. Was in fact working up vehement opposition to the concept in favour of, presumably, more and more Gryphons SDs.

Hamish and D'Orville were both at Third Yeltsin, IIRC, and Parnell was almost deified for getting so many of his ships out of that trap. I do wonder about that - was Parnell really so good or did the RMN make a couple of slip-ups there too?

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The RMN is mostly very good, no doubt. It's just not perfect or invincible.

Correct, the RMN cannot be invincible all the time. That's also part of the discussion of the RMN not making relevant mistakes against the SLN in that war. I've argued that there were likely mistakes, but the difference in capability in tech was so great that those weren't significant to the outcomes.

However, there's one important difference between White Haven and D'Orville: while White Haven was intentionally kept out of the loop of the new improvements so he'd focus on fighting wars like the RMN knew worked, D'Orville was part of Project Gram and worked for Admiral Adcock! He was part of the initial development of many of those technologies, especially the MDM. He was supposed to have the mental flexibility to account for them.

I guess he won't be as fondly remembered as his illustrious ancestor...

One of the things we tend to forget is that the viewpoint characters we see the universe through are the A team for a reason. Even without Harrington, how much better would 3rd fleet have done if Truman or McKeon had been in command?

If anything the debacle that was BoM needs to be laid at the feet of White Haven and especially Caparelli for not ensuring the fleet simulated all-out attacks like Beatrice. Even with the biggest names on the A team not available due to combat ops, the War College should have been able to come up with some "what if" scenarios that were more than complicated methods of suicide for the attackers, adding in potential technical developments that the defense had to react to and adjust for. Maybe they wouldn't have seen the donkey coming, but there were likely a handful of other potential "Shannon Specials" that could have been thrown their way to prompt more active planning. The biggest one I can think of would be something akin to the pseudo-Apollo - a missile that duplicates Apollo's ability to network in STL control mode with all the accuracy that would entail. That would be something Havenite tech could pull off and would vastly unbalance a fleet engagement in their favor.

Second to that would be some sort of missile defense tech that boosts the Havenite missile defenses Manticore levels of accuracy while keeping the mass fire aspects of existing Havenite design. Suddenly the defenders' missile hit rate is half of what it should be, and how do they react to it? Create your own potential tech or tactical surprise, and exercise Home Fleet against that. It's not like it as to be full live fire simulations or anything, simply a flag deck exercise would do.

Galactic Sapper wrote:If anything the debacle that was BoM needs to be laid at the feet of White Haven and especially Caparelli for not ensuring the fleet simulated all-out attacks like Beatrice. Even with the biggest names on the A team not available due to combat ops, the War College should have been able to come up with some "what if" scenarios that were more than complicated methods of suicide for the attackers, adding in potential technical developments that the defense had to react to and adjust for. Maybe they wouldn't have seen the donkey coming, but there were likely a handful of other potential "Shannon Specials" that could have been thrown their way to prompt more active planning.

Kind of a Black Swan. Who would have thought the Havenites would commit the majority of their fleet to an all-or-nothing attack?

Galactic Sapper wrote:If anything the debacle that was BoM needs to be laid at the feet of White Haven and especially Caparelli for not ensuring the fleet simulated all-out attacks like Beatrice.

Don’t shit on Caparelli. The poor guy performed spectacularly in the first war but was sidelined when White Haven ascended to First Lord.

Caparelli was the best strategician they had. By a mile. He performed brilliantly during the first war
White Haven got all the glory and surely is a great field commander, but his term as First Lord was a disaster.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Kind of a Black Swan. Who would have thought the Havenites would commit the majority of their fleet to an all-or-nothing attack?

Because no one has ever planned for the unlikely, right?

Star Knight wrote:Don’t shit on Caparelli. The poor guy performed spectacularly in the first war but was sidelined when White Haven ascended to First Lord.

Caparelli was the best strategician they had. By a mile. He performed brilliantly during the first war
White Haven got all the glory and surely is a great field commander, but his term as First Lord was a disaster.

If by "sidelined" you mean put back into his position as First Space Lord, I guess. He got sidelined by Janecek, White Haven brought him back.

Galactic Sapper wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Kind of a Black Swan. Who would have thought the Havenites would commit the majority of their fleet to an all-or-nothing attack?

Because no one has ever planned for the unlikely, right?

I'm not talking about likelihood. I'm talking about unpredictability. If you can envision the situation, you can figure out what to do if it did happen. Sometimes, that means asking for more resources; sometimes you say "it's too unlikely, we'll take that risk".

The problem is when you couldn't come up with that scenario in the first place. Then no one will have simulated it and figure out what would happen.

Hindsight is 20/20 and we have it. For us, it's clear that Beatrice was the only option Haven had. They were going to be defeated anyway, so they had one shot at winning and not being dictated terms with Eighth Fleet in orbit around Nouveau Paris. Similarly, we discussed that Parnell should have done the same, rolled the dice and attacked Manticore directly.

But was that something the planners would have thought of? At the time, the RoH was still seen as "Peeps" in Manticore and thus couldn't afford to lose the majority of its fleet, even if it won. Even if it was thought of, the likelihood may have been low enough that D'Orville never exercised a lot in it.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:But was that something the planners would have thought of? At the time, the RoH was still seen as "Peeps" in Manticore and thus couldn't afford to lose the majority of its fleet, even if it won. Even if it was thought of, the likelihood may have been low enough that D'Orville never exercised a lot in it.

Absolutely yes, if only from the scale of defense standpoint. By that I mean do you plan to be able to defend against 100 SDs, 200, 300? How big does Home Fleet have to be, how many system defense pods, how many forts?

They knew Haven had hundreds of SDs and were building more faster than they could. It should have occurred to someone to game out what would happen if 250 SDs were thrown at defenses sized to defeat 200 SDs, for example, even if it was only done on the scale of a couple dozen people working in Harrington's game room. I have no doubt that it would have been done at least once if Harrington had still been in command of the Crusher, even if it wasn't part of her command responsibility. to do so.

Galactic Sapper wrote:They knew Haven had hundreds of SDs and were building more faster than they could. It should have occurred to someone to game out what would happen if 250 SDs were thrown at defenses sized to defeat 200 SDs, for example, even if it was only done on the scale of a couple dozen people working in Harrington's game room. I have no doubt that it would have been done at least once if Harrington had still been in command of the Crusher, even if it wasn't part of her command responsibility. to do so.

And if it had been 250 SDs, Kuzak would still be around. Haven threw 350 SDs at it. If the defences were sized to stop 200 SDs, a 175% increase will definitely shatter it.

We know, with the benefit of hindsight and no author plot hammer, that those defences would have stopped 250 Havenite SD(P)s, at the expense of gutting Home Fleet, but not obliterating it. Better yet if the forces at the Junction and right past it could respond in time. There must have been plans for that type of defensive action.

350 SD(P)s was probably considered too unlikely that neither D'Orville nor Kuzak weren't completely familiar with it. A pincer movement may have not been considered at all.