OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Agreed on Sol. SLN arrogance probably meant they never even thought of defending it, even though rationally they'd know that they were vulnerable. But far more important is what you said: production probably meant all Cataphract pods were being sent to active fleets, not to system defence.

Even if there were pods in Sol, Cataphracts are dual-drive missiles, so the Grand Fleet outranged them by 35 million km. All the GF would have had to do was remain outside the hyper limit while they mapped the pod locations and systematically took them out. They didn't even have to take them all out, just enough to make the point that resistance would have been futile. The SLN really didn't want to anger Honor any more at that point.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:If you're being hit you should have been using your countermissile systems. They were being hit hard, there were no unnecessary launchers other than ones that couldn't bear.

So you you have a sniper rifle and see a bunch of guys with pistols 800 yards away who are coming to kill you. You decide that to maximize your first round hit probability you'll wait until they start shooting before you will shoot. Does this seem like a good plan?

But unknown to you, what you think are pistols are revealed to be shotguns when they all open fire at you at 15 yards. How do you think this scenario is going to end?

You can't concede every technological and positional advantage to the enemy and then claim "Well, you know, we did the best we could" and expect us not to laugh at you.


Haven can shoot back at 70 million km. They just can't hit very much. Hence you don't need the same scale of defenses you need once you are deep inside their effective range, where they are probably going to hit with every missile unless you stop it. Like say if you wait until they decide what is the most favorable range for them to best kill you.

Letting the enemy control the tempo and conditions of the fight is not how you win fights.

And from an operational point of view you need them to expend every missile you can get them to shoot, both because you have a lot more ammo per ship and because you have reinforcements coming.

Galactic Sapper wrote:Naval Station Ganymede mass launched 120,000 Cataphract pods at Grand Fleet, and Grand Fleet predictably hypered out a few seconds before they hit. No word on whether they were a specialized system defense variant, though.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Which makes no sense. Honor was beyond the hyper limit and had plenty of time to dodge. Why would the sillies think there was any chance of those birds doing anything?

"But he's had the crap hammered out of him, Ma'am," Smithson objected. "The recon platforms indicate he's got heavy battle damage to at least half his survivors, and his acceleration rate would be proof enough of that, even without the platforms' reports. So say he's got the equivalent of eighty wallers' combat power—which is generous, I'd say—and they're still Peep SD(P)s. We don't have as many units as Home Fleet had, but all of ours are Medusas or Harringtons, and that gives us the edge in real combat power. Not only that, but he's got to have used up a lot of ammo. Hell, he didn't fire a single MDM at the LACs, and you saw what they did to his screen. His magazines have to be close to empty."
"So if his situation is so desperate," Judson Latrell asked, "why didn't he abandon the rest of his ships with impeller damage and run for it at a higher acceleration rate in the first place?"
"I suppose the answer to that depends at least in part on exactly what their actual objective is," Kuzak said.
She glanced at the master plot. Twenty-six minutes had passed since Third Fleet had translated back into normal-space. It was hard to believe that barely two hours ago, Home Fleet and all of its units had been safely in orbit around Sphinx. Now they were gone, reduced to spreading patterns of wreckage, and her own command was accelerating steadily towards battle with their killers at 6.01 KPS2. Her base velocity was up to almost ten thousand kilometers per second, she'd traveled the next best thing to eight million kilometers into the RZ, and the range to Second Fleet was coming down to right on sixty million kilometers. Which meant, of course, that they were already in her range, just as she was in theirs.
"Whatever they're up to," she said grimly, "I think you've got a point about their ammunition supply, Jerry. In which case, they aren't going to be hitting us with any more of those monster salvos. And it also means they haven't got enough birds left to waste them firing at long range, with their hit probabilities. We, on the other hand, have full magazines."

Loren Pechtel wrote:

Galactic Sapper wrote:Naval Station Ganymede mass launched 120,000 Cataphract pods at Grand Fleet, and Grand Fleet predictably hypered out a few seconds before they hit. No word on whether they were a specialized system defense variant, though.

Which makes no sense. Honor was beyond the hyper limit and had plenty of time to dodge. Why would the sillies think there was any chance of those birds doing anything?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Just a thought: what ship classes did d'Orville have? The wiki says he had 42 SD(P)s and 48 regular SDs. Those SDs could fire exactly one massive salvo, that made up of their limpet pods, as they couldn't roll pods again. And those ships couldn't defend themselves until they did, since those same pods were blocking sensors and CM tubes. So holding his alpha salvo for closer, where he could get a better pH/pK with a larger salvo made sense.

Not just on the SDs, the limpet pods would block CM tubes on the SD(P)s too. So if he were to fire from the SDs, he had to fire from the SD(P)s too.

Can Sphinx- and Gryphon-class SDs even fire MDMs from internal tubes? I don't think we've ever heard of MDMs being fired from anything except pods and ships designed after MDMs came into being. If they can't, then over half his wall units would be passive until they got to SDM range.

On the other hand, he didn't have to have a monster salvo. Given the range, he could fire multiple big-enough salvos to force RHN Second Fleet to flush anything they had outside their hulls and prevent them from rolling more again. Of course, there's a minimum size before any missiles even get through the 3200 LACs and other escorts.

Anyway, what strategy should D'Orville have adopted that would have had more of Second Fleet damaged or destroyed before Home Fleet was?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Can Sphinx- and Gryphon-class SDs even fire MDMs from internal tubes? I don't think we've ever heard of MDMs being fired from anything except pods and ships designed after MDMs came into being. If they can't, then over half his wall units would be passive until they got to SDM range.

kzt wrote:This would have been starting firing at over 100m km, so accuracy wouldn't have been great. But it's pretty safe to say that an extra 20 minutes of missile fire with another 400,000 missiles would have done more damage than those missiles did to 2nd in practice, and they take more damage the closer they get. And it certainly would have prevented the massive salvos Haven was able to build unmolested.