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What next after To End in Fire

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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Mon Jul 04, 2022 6:26 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:I imagine a mitigating factor was indeed the timing. They knew roughly when Filareta was arriving, so they knew when Tsang would move, so they knew when those ships had to be there. That limited the time they would be exposed to an attack. Such an attack would need to be opportunistic, and not as well-planned as the Strikes were.

Except, of course, that the MAlign knew exactly why they had sent Tsang there, so they knew what would happen. Like Fabius later, they could have pre-positioned assets to "help" her.


Except the MAlign had no reason to know the fleet was there--the intent was to provoke an incident with Beowulf and then get them killed by the junction forts. The MAlign isn't going to send scarce assets on the possibility that the plan had leaked and that Manticore would be in a position to thwart their stunt at Beowulf.

While they expected the SLN to get reamed at Manticore that doesn't mean they expected the GA to be able to divert the force it did to Beowulf.

Thus, even if they are seen it's going to take time for word to get back to Darius and torps sent. I don't think enough time exists.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by kzt   » Mon Jul 04, 2022 7:52 pm

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Loren Pechtel wrote:.
Thus, even if they are seen it's going to take time for word to get back to Darius and torps sent. I don't think enough time exists.

Who could have predicted that the SLN would make a big attack on Beowulf and that the RMN will be there to support them with a fleet? I'm sure the MA would never have guessed that would happen.

I wonder how the giant bombs and the Silver Bullets happened to be at Beowulf? Probably just a delivery error, right?
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by tlb   » Mon Jul 04, 2022 9:15 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:I imagine a mitigating factor was indeed the timing. They knew roughly when Filareta was arriving, so they knew when Tsang would move, so they knew when those ships had to be there. That limited the time they would be exposed to an attack. Such an attack would need to be opportunistic, and not as well-planned as the Strikes were.

Except, of course, that the MAlign knew exactly why they had sent Tsang there, so they knew what would happen. Like Fabius later, they could have pre-positioned assets to "help" her.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Except the MAlign had no reason to know the fleet was there--the intent was to provoke an incident with Beowulf and then get them killed by the junction forts. The MAlign isn't going to send scarce assets on the possibility that the plan had leaked and that Manticore would be in a position to thwart their stunt at Beowulf. Having their wedges down meant that they were useless.

While they expected the SLN to get reamed at Manticore that doesn't mean they expected the GA to be able to divert the force it did to Beowulf.

Thus, even if they are seen it's going to take time for word to get back to Darius and torps sent. I don't think enough time exists.

kzt wrote:Who could have predicted that the SLN would make a big attack on Beowulf and that the RMN will be there to support them with a fleet? I'm sure the MA would never have guessed that would happen.

I wonder how the giant bombs and the Silver Bullets happened to be at Beowulf? Probably just a delivery error, right?

There is a confusion here between the two separate events at Beowulf; it is a confusion in which I have also participated.

I agree that the SLN and the Malign might not know about the RMN ships at the Beowulf end of the wormhole at the the time of the Filareta attack.

However the RMN fleet is still there and has their wedges down at the time of the Solarian attack on Beowulf itself. That is the point where criticism is due. What if the freighters that dropped off the Silver Bullets that attacked Mycroft, had also dropped off a bunch that made its way to the wormhole and the defenseless fleet? What was the purpose of this fleet, if it was impossible for them to respond to that Solarian attack?
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 12:41 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:And without first hand evidence that the sensors do pick up the kinds of weapons used against Manticore and Grayson I don't think I'd be so complacent about leaving 3rd fleet (less some ready response BC squadrons) with cold nodes.


Keeping the nodes energised for months on end puts a severe wear on them, shortening their lifetimes. The ships may as well keep flying erratic and random courses to keep from being targeted by something that has to come in ballistically.

Or they can invest on detection. If they can have a sensor bubble 15 light-seconds in radius, that puts any penetration 4.5 million km away, which is far more than energy range (note: against unmoving targets, it should be enough, but I didn't make the rules; maybe they are using cold jets to do a random dance). If they are in the middle of fixed defences, then those defences should be able to shoot at anything coming at them. If detection of a weapon moving at 0.25c happens at 4.2 million km (14 light-seconds) away, CMs can intercept the weapons short of energy range. The CMs will need 34 seconds to surpass to get to ~750,000 km from the targets they're defending, while the weapons will have closed only 8.5 light-seconds, meaning they are still 2.5 light-seconds from the CMs and energy range.

The ships' impellers can't be brought up fast enough, but missiles' can. They can be used in barricade mode to interpose themselves between the detected bogey and the ships.

Note this has to happen anywhere a fleet is located, if it is not moving. The terminus is not an exclusive location where this is worse than anywhere else.

And that's doubly true around a Junction terminus with its relatively tiny hyper limit (less than a million km). An attacker with good astrogation, and a willingness to risk clipping the RZ (with the destruction that would entail) could drop out of hyper within missile range of the Junction and the fleet anchoring there. I don't care how good your sensors are when someone can pop out of hyper within a couple million km and have missiles hitting you in just a handful of minutes; long before any of the ships could get their wedges and sidewalls up. You better pray that the fixed defenses can confuse, kill, or, lacking, that soak up all those missiles or you'd lose a lot of hideously vulnerable ships. (Though the attacker likely wouldn't survive the counter battery fire)


Note: we're talking about the terminus on the Beowulf side, but as I said above, all places have the same problem, so the Junction counts too.

However, you're right that an attacker could simply arrive from alpha and fire at anything inside the volume of the Junction or terminus' hyperlimit. That is a mere light-second in radius, so anything inside that volume is within energy range of something that made their alpha translation close enough. And this doesn't need a spider drive or graser torpedo. Any ship's capital graser broadside could do the job. It is a suicide mission, though.

Anyway, just how do they defend against this?


Of course the Mycroft platforms defending the inner system wouldn't be inside the Junction's sensor bubble -- they're 362 LM from the primary -- but how about sensor bubbles of their own?


That was my question. Either they did not have sufficient sensor coverage, or that coverage wasn't sufficient to detect the Silver Bullets.

If it is the former, it might be that you can't have that many sensor platforms and remain stealthy. No one doubts where the terminus is and the location of the ships was obvious too. So having sufficient drones for the sensor coverage wouldn't be revealing anything anyone didn't yet know. But emplacing them around the Mycroft platforms could have.

Now there would likely be multiple shells of platforms, though the inner shell may, or may not, provide full coverage -- but you'd want enough that you'd have multiple redundant paths of relays between the planet(s) and the outer shell of platforms. Specifically so some malfunction, sabotage, or attack, can't easily cut the planets off from those.


I didn't get the impression they had more than a handful yet. I agree on the redundancy, but I don't think they'd achieved that goal.

However I don't know if any Mycroft platforms would be close enough to a planet to be inside its own sensor bubble (which is hopefully just as tight as the one around the Junction) -- though possibly at least one of the "master platforms" would be close enough to Beowulf to be within its sensor bubble (in which case, since they seem to have all gotten blown up, we'd have evidence that those sensors failed to detect the Silver Bullet(s) that killed those platforms).


Agreed, but we don't know that.

However, I don't think each of the outer shell of Mycroft platforms would sit within its own sensor bubble. That would either require covering the surface area of a ~20 LM sphere with sensors -- which would require a ludicrous number of sensor platforms -- or else providing a little pinprick sensor bubble around each Mycroft platform -- which would rather highlight where they are for any attacker trying to take them out. They're supposed to hide until needed -- sticking a bunch of radars and other active sensors around them rather defeats that.


Yup.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 1:07 am

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kzt wrote:So you are saying that their system will detect something so stealthy that it penetrated through all the RMN home system defenses, including the orbital fortress that was a hell of lot closer than 15 minutes, without detection until it deep inside max effective range from the best protected site the RMN has?


I'm saying they think it will. Whether they're right or not, we don't know yet.

I have to point out that during the Yawata Strike, they wouldn't have had this kind of in-depth coverage because no one expected to need it. No one had attempted an insertion from a light-month away and on drives that weren't detected by the existing long-range sensors. But once it happened, it stands to reason they'd want to improve the detection capabilities. And they think they have.

Without an actual working sample or even a successful detection?


Which neither proves nor disproves the ability to detect. Do remember that there was (at least) one detection during the Strike, it just came too late to make any difference.

But that said, I agree it's risky to count on something not yet proven to work.

1) RMN flag officers have all taken up smoking crack.
2) The RMN is composed solely of people overwhelmed with arrogance, so while they may not know how that super secret undetectable drive works they know it won't slip by them.
3) The RMN has no clue that a super stealthy weapon was used that can't be detected by any of their detection systems and assumes they were basically ballistic, just like the missile pods.


It's not #3 because they know there's a new drive system. Unless #1 is true and they've forgotten about it because of their crack addiction.

That leaves #2, which by process of exclusion has to be the answer, though I wouldn't put it quite that way in the level of arrogance. They do know how well their sensors are.

I just have to wonder about the 15 light-minute mark. That's WAY too far to be useful for interception, but at the same time way too close to bring the wedges up if the bogey is coming at 0.5c or better or still accelerating. To cover it with recon drones so nothing can sneak past without coming within 200,000 km of one you'd need the better part of a million drones. There's no way they'd do that -- it would be more expensive than just keeping those impellers hot in the first place. You could also shrink it to the effective engagement range for CMs outside of energy range and thus deploy far fewer sensor platforms. The 15-light-second sphere there I calculated for the reply to Jonathan above would need 900 drones.

So either you're right and they're grossly overestimating their capabilities... or they're not. Is there any possibility they have a revolutionary new sensor technology, though too bulky to be carried around ships? I don't think so, because we'd have got wisps of it in typical RFC fashion of dropping some hints here and there.

But what else can explain a battle-hardened RMN admiral thinking that they have a secure 15-light-minute sensor bubble?

Those missile pods did manage to penetrate completely through the heart of the RMH home system and attack right under the nose of the orbital fortresses. And combined this certainly should have a far more elaborate and sensitive sensors than a fleet does.


I disagree. See above.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by kzt   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 2:31 am

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15 light minutes is 270 million km.

That provides a surface area of 916,000 million square KM. A recon drone with a 0.2 million km detection radius can cover 0.13 million square km of that surface.

So it actually requires a mere 7.5 million recon drones deployed on station. Which means you need 10-20 million depending on the refurbishment time. That would require about 3 billion tons of the typical 300 ton recon drones at minimum.

So I find this claim by the RMN to be, umm, doubtful.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 9:41 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Jonathan_S wrote:And without first hand evidence that the sensors do pick up the kinds of weapons used against Manticore and Grayson I don't think I'd be so complacent about leaving 3rd fleet (less some ready response BC squadrons) with cold nodes.


Keeping the nodes energised for months on end puts a severe wear on them, shortening their lifetimes. The ships may as well keep flying erratic and random courses to keep from being targeted by something that has to come in ballistically.

I was thinking of a middle ground between 'only a couple BC ready response squadrons with hot nodes' and 'everybody with hot nodes' -- say 1/6th - 1/4 of the fleet's squadrons, balanced across ship types, with hot nodes.

Yes, that's still faster node wear than keeping only a couple of squadrons of lighter units with hot nodes -- but it gives a far more capable ready response -- including likely some Apollo capable units.

OTOH it's possible that node preservation was a higher priority post-OB that it was previously; and so there was more weight on the 'extend node life' side of the 'node life' vs 'readiness' trade-off.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Note: we're talking about the terminus on the Beowulf side, but as I said above, all places have the same problem, so the Junction counts too.
Yep -- despite the text confusingly calling it "The Beowulf Junction". But as far as I recall we're never told how large the hyper limit around a terminus is; but I imagine it'd be no larger than the one around it's parent junction (assuming it's associated with one). So we're still talking <= 1,000,000 km. But I probably should have been explicit that I was applying the hyper limit info we did know (Junctions) and extrapolating that it also applied to their termini.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:However, you're right that an attacker could simply arrive from alpha and fire at anything inside the volume of the Junction or terminus' hyperlimit. That is a mere light-second in radius, so anything inside that volume is within energy range of something that made their alpha translation close enough. And this doesn't need a spider drive or graser torpedo. Any ship's capital graser broadside could do the job. It is a suicide mission, though.

Anyway, just how do they defend against this?

Normally you defend against this using forts; which, except for maintenance periods, will have their bubble sidewalls up constantly -- and thus be pretty well protected against surprise energy fire. And their likelihood of surviving a surprise attack long enough to respond is what makes such a pounce a suicide mission -- which is a deterrence against trying it.

Normally I don't think you'd have a fleet stated as terminus defense (though Manticore's Home Fleet had to be for a while after the old Junction forts were decommissioned and before new modern ones were build to replace them. But that's a nervous position to have your fleet in.

Of if you're guarding a terminus without forts (and hopefully without much vulnerable infrastructure); say as during Lacoon, I'd go for dispersion and stealth. Don't park your ship atop the terminus; where their position would be pretty predictable -- scatter them in stealth within easy missile range of it and have them change positions randomly. They'd lack the protection of its tiny hyper limit; but they'd should see an attacker before the attacker can find and engage them -- so they'll should be able to choose their shot.
Last edited by Jonathan_S on Tue Jul 05, 2022 9:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 9:51 am

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kzt wrote:So you are saying that their system will detect something so stealthy that it penetrated through all the RMN home system defenses, including the orbital fortress that was a hell of lot closer than 15 minutes, without detection until it deep inside max effective range from the best protected site the RMN has?

Without an actual working sample or even a successful detection?

So there are three options here:
1) RMN flag officers have all taken up smoking crack.
2) The RMN is composed solely of people overwhelmed with arrogance, so while they may not know how that super secret undetectable drive works they know it won't slip by them.
3) The RMN has no clue that a super stealthy weapon was used that can't be detected by any of their detection systems and assumes they were basically ballistic, just like the missile pods.

Those missile pods did manage to penetrate completely through the heart of the RMH home system and attack right under the nose of the orbital fortresses. And combined this certainly should have a far more elaborate and sensitive sensors than a fleet does.

Note however that the fleet wasn't necessarily relying on its own sensors to establish that 'airtight' sensor bubble. They're sitting on the Beowulf terminus of the Junction, which we're told has "…formidable" fixed defenses. (And that those defenses are why the fleet can afford to stand down -- though I disagree that they should have stood down quite so much).

Those fixed defenses should have a lot of sensor capability of their own and I'd expect that they're providing at least the significant majority of that sensor bubble.

So it doesn't matter if the Manticore system had better sensors during OB that a fleet can (still) carry -- the actual question at hand is whether in a post-OB world the fixed defenses of Beowulf's Junction (now) have better and more alert sensors in the area around it than the relevant parts of the Manticore system had during OB.
And it seems quite possible that they've been upgraded and enhanced to the point where it does.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by kzt   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 5:24 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:
And it seems quite possible that they've been upgraded and enhanced to the point where it does.

I doubt it.

There are no defenses on the Beowulf side of the junction other than the Beowulf SDF. Just astro control.

When the RFP get issued next year, following the revised statement of needs from the SDF N3, we expect the responses six months later to start to define what we can accomplish. Funding should be available next FY for long lead time items once the prime is selected, with first operational fort in no more then 60 months after contract issuance. Baring funding issues or contract disputes, that should be no more than 8 t-years from today.
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Re: What next after To End in Fire
Post by Loren Pechtel   » Tue Jul 05, 2022 5:43 pm

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kzt wrote:
Loren Pechtel wrote:.
Thus, even if they are seen it's going to take time for word to get back to Darius and torps sent. I don't think enough time exists.

Who could have predicted that the SLN would make a big attack on Beowulf and that the RMN will be there to support them with a fleet? I'm sure the MA would never have guessed that would happen.

I wonder how the giant bombs and the Silver Bullets happened to be at Beowulf? Probably just a delivery error, right?


Consider what happens if the GA fleet isn't there: Beowulf simply has to back down and let them transit and the fleet dies to the junction forts. The fleet poses no threat to anyone. Is the MA going to expect the GA to send a fleet simply for the purpose of saving the SLN fleet?
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