tlb wrote:Lets say he goes for Manticore: I do not think Honor's fleet has to shoot itself dry before he gets there, harassing fire would be sufficient until it get into better range to use Apollo. The reason is that, for me, the RHN cannot claim to be in control of the orbitals if they are still contesting with the RMN. So the RHN either has to slow down as it nears Manticore allowing Honor's fleet to get into a better distance that puts the advantage with Apollo or take passing shots as it heads for the hyper limit losing wounded ships as it goes, without Honor's fleet ever needing to get into a range where it can be reliably hit.
Did she have enough of an acceleration advantage to close that quickly? A Sovereign of Space can pull 529 gravities and an Invictus 562. We don't know what vector Tourville would need to adopt to go from where he was to Manticore, how far he was, what his base velocity was, or what his max acceleration with damaged units would be (though he had already ditched the most damaged ones), which makes this calculation very hard.
I'm going to adopt numbers out of thin air: let's say Second Fleet is 100 million km from Manticore and can only sustain 450 gravities of acceleration. That means it needs 160 minutes of flight to reach Manticore, with a turn-over at 80 minutes (let's ignore any base velocity). In 160 minutes, going flat out and without decelerating, Eighth Fleet can get up to 52956 km/s and travel 254 million km. We know Eighth Fleet is at roughly 150 million km, but we don't know what angle 8th, 2nd and Manticore form. But it doesn't matter, because in the worst case they'd be in a straight line and that would only add up to 250 million km. In this scenario, Honor can beat Tourville to Manticore, which means she has him under powered envelope for some time (calculating how long and the actual powered range given the ships' base velocities is too complex for now).
If Second Fleet could pull it max accel, the flight time would be 146 minutes, during which Eighth can cover 212.6 million km. Or, that is to say, be at 47.4 million km of Second as it was trying to control the Manticore orbitals, with the range decreasing very quickly.
Conclusion: Manticore would need to be much closer for him to beat Honor there with enough time to spare, which isn't likely, as he had been shaping a course for Sphinx, not Manticore, and the planets are pretty far from each other for most of the year.
Going for Sphinx would take him roughly in the direction of Eighth Fleet, so it's no salvation either.
If he accepted a stern chase to the hyper limit, which is around 40 light-minutes away (G0 star's is 22 light-minutes in radius), he could reach it in 4.6 hours @ 529 gravities, 4.75 h at 500 G, and 5 h at 450 G. Either case he's at less than 0.3c, so he doesn't need to decelerate to translate out. Eight fleet can cover 49.6 light-minutes in 5 hours, 45 light-minutes at 4.75 hours, and 42.5 in 4.6 hours. But it starts 8 light-minutes behind. So if Tourville can pull his max accel, Honor is still at least 5.5 light-minutes (99 million km) away and I would say that's a good chance at escaping. But at 500 gravities, Honor is still 3 light-minutes (54 million km) away, which isn't very good chance of escaping.