OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

Brigade XO wrote:make them use them before they get into more than extreme range?

Every missile they shoot at home fleet is a missile they can't shoot at 3rd.

kzt wrote:

He fired a grand total of 20% of his pod load. The further out he starts firing the more rounds he can fire and the better the hit ratio of RMN to Peep. The closer the range, the less advantage he has. In addition, he knew 3rd would be showing up soon, so he wants to have 2nd exhaust all their ammo against home, and it will take a lot more rounds at long range. So when you have a lifetime supply of ammo and your hit ratio at extreme range is significantly higher and tour opponent is ammo limited you want to draw him into a long-range duel. At best he just soaks the losses as you beat the hell out of him starting at 70m km (or whatever leaves you with no ammo by the point where you expect to get killed)

But he was beaten senseless by the author’s plot hammer...

There are trade-offs. With the pods tractored to the hull of the Home Fleet SDs they were blocking sensors, CM tubes, and PDLCs. He had to drop a fair percentage of his pods before return fire reached ~3 million km in order to properly engage those incoming missiles.

So fire earlier, with crappier hit probability, and (assuming the RHN returns fire) you're forcing yourself to drop a lot of pods out where they'll shortly be prox killed earlier than you need to.


Obviously it's bad to die with 80% of your pods unfired. But I'm still not convinced that you're going to be a lot more effective if you start firing early. You probably last longer, and force the RHN to expend more missiles to kill you (since they've got crappier p-Hit too), but I'm not sure you'll do more damage to the RHN.

Why would you not just dump them in advance?

You don't have to drop them right before you fire. You can produce a trail of pods following you a million km long. Go ahead RHN, try to saturate that.

And at long range it's likely you won't have to use every counter missile system, you could just build a formation and have the ships with the best antimissile system block, and they drop all their pods and the pods get controlled by the rest.

Plus at super long range you have time to shoot a lot more missiles before you need to defend.

So I'm not impressed with this answer. It's lazy.

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.

BoM is the most significant battle of the series. RFC led up to it quite well. It is the Peep's coup de grace.

One thing I thought I'd finally see, but still missing in the series is the use of . . .

1. Forts.

2. System-defense pods.

I thought they are called system-defense pods for a reason. But nowhere did someone finally let the dog-gone pods out. That was a bummer. Even in the mighty Sol system there were no many manly missiles watching over the system to let loose. What another bummer, two.

Why are the system-defense pods never fired when they're needed the most? IINM, they were fired against the Sillies, but they were not needed.

Robert_A_Woodward wrote:

cthia wrote:In essence, what I'm hearing, is we now know where RFC places Theisman, in relation to Honor. An inadvertent reveal?

Because obviously Theisman never considered Honor putting a third of her total pod loadout on the hull.

Late edit: Forgive me for using pincer in the place of mousetrap. Damfino, except we were recently discussing flanks and pincers in a current thread, and I haven't quite left that playground. And because I couldn't remember mousetrap.

The real problem is that there were over 3 times more podnaughts equipped with Apollo than Theisman expected. For that matter, the control missile multiplied the number of missiles that could be controlled by a factor of 8. IIRC, 8th Fleet hadn't fired enough missiles at Lovat to reveal this.

That plus the fact that the mousetrap went off on the first fleet to come through, it missed her.

kzt wrote:Why would you not just dump them in advance?

You don't have to drop them right before you fire. You can produce a trail of pods following you a million km long. Go ahead RHN, try to saturate that.

And at long range it's likely you won't have to use every counter missile system, you could just build a formation and have the ships with the best antimissile system block, and they drop all their pods and the pods get controlled by the rest.

Plus at super long range you have time to shoot a lot more missiles before you need to defend.

So I'm not impressed with this answer. It's lazy.

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.

cthia wrote:I thought they are called system-defense pods for a reason. But nowhere did someone finally let the dog-gone pods out. That was a bummer. Even in the mighty Sol system there were no many manly missiles watching over the system to let loose. What another bummer, two.

Why are the system-defense pods never fired when they're needed the most? IINM, they were fired against the Sillies, but they were not needed.

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.

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)
Edit: I was reminded that Naval Station Ganymede did flush their 120,000 Cataphract pods at Honor's fleet to returning fire after Honor launched. But because of the extreme range, and the fact the Manties were staying outside the hyper limit, the fire was completely ineffective.


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.

Jonathan_S wrote: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)

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.

But at Manticore? There should have been shoals of scattered pre-Apollo MDMs. We don't know what kind of C&C existed prior to Mycroft, but I find it hard to believe there wouldn't have been a distributed / redundant system. And at Manticore there wouldn't even have been a light-speed communication problem: the system defence pods should have fired time-on-target with Home Fleet.

They couldn't even have been planning to save them in case the SLN showed up (this was after Monica after all). This was prior to activation of Lacoön, but the plans existed, so they knew they could delay the SLN long enough to replenish. More importantly, it was prior to Oyster Bay, so the RMN, GSN and IAN production capacity was intact.

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.