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Pod layers.

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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Fri Nov 11, 2022 4:55 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:that same kind of fire is going to rapidly strip Home Fleet of most of its long range punch by destroying those externally limpeted pods. :O

Nope. The pods are inside the wedge and sidewalls. So they are only damaged if the ship they are on is hit. What they do is limit the ability of the fleet to defend itself against missiles. So if the incoming missiles are not a real threat they can ignore them. And at long range they are not a real threat unless 2nd starts firing a LOT of missiles.

Optionally Home fleet can just dump enough to unmask some fraction of their point defenses, producing a string of pods a million or two KM long that they use for harassing fire.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by tlb   » Fri Nov 11, 2022 5:23 pm

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tlb wrote:As for recon drones; they are much slower, but the forts at Sphinx could have deployed some. I am not sure what difference it would make , since Home Fleet only has what it has. If only they had tractored Apollo pods, instead of the regular pods that they were issued.

kzt wrote:Well, I'm kind of thinking that even David would find it hard to have the drug addled dolts he substituted in for the admirals at BoM not reacting to the images showing hundreds of SDs each deploying hundreds of pods.

You know, the recon drones that can get close enough to a fleet to read the name painted on the hull without being detected?

Which is why they 'forgot' to send out recon drones in the several hours the fleets were closing in.

I am unclear what additional options Home Fleet has, if they know exactly what they are facing. The only one I can imagine is to fire earlier, but that will not affect what Tourville can send back except to increase the range. Tourville has more ships and missiles and those ships have more control links to control those missiles (even without multiplexing).

Home Fleet is the only force between Tourville and the main planet and the space station and ship yards; so Home Fleet has to stand and take whatever is coming their way.

The only way Home Fleet could do more than they did, would be if they had been issued Apollo pods to tractor to their hulls. That way they could have fired before Tourville could fire back, which would seriously deplete his offensive capabilities. So I see Home Fleet's destruction as solely the responsibility of an Admiralty that did not give Apollo missiles to Home Fleet at the same time they were supplying them to Gryphon.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:21 pm

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tlb wrote:
The only way Home Fleet could do more than they did, would be if they had been issued Apollo pods to tractor to their hulls. That way they could have fired before Tourville could fire back, which would seriously deplete his offensive capabilities. So I see Home Fleet's destruction as solely the responsibility of an Admiralty that did not give Apollo missiles to Home Fleet at the same time they were supplying them to Gryphon.

No. home fleet fired something like 20% of their ammo by not firing until 65m KM, which is effective range for the RHN. Home fleet had enough pods to fire their Avalanche salvos for 27 minutes and the expected time of the battle was possibly 20 minutes per D'Orville.

The predicted salvo size from Haven would by 360 missiles per haven ship, or ~108,000 missiles total, per minute. 108,000 missiles will kill 4-8 RMN SDs per salvo (and defenses degrade per salvo, so each subsequent salvo does more damage), so a more realistic assumption is about 10 minutes to total destruction, and after 6 minutes you'll have a lot of damaged ships.

You know your PH at very long range is much higher, and your PK per hit is somewhat higher, and your defenses are much more effective. But 108,000 missiles is bad, so you need to degrade accuracy as effectively as you can. The best way to do that is long range, because David says long range MDMs are far less accurate then close range MDMs because.

So basically you want to start shooting where the enemy is out of their effective range and just at the edge of you effective range. Then hope to survive about 15 minutes after they start shooting back. This has 7-8 final salvos in flight after Home fleet is destroyed.

The horde of LACs provided by the Sphinx orbital defenses will add greatly to your missile defense so this seems viable. I'm not sure what range you want to fire at, but it is a hell of lot further than 65 million KM. I suspect you would want the last salvo to be at more than 65M KM, not the first.

The fact that this blows up the planned Donkey deployment is really just a coincidence. But home fleet still gets obliterated.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by tlb   » Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:43 pm

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Here is an interesting thing from chapter 64 of At All Costs:
"Does Tracking have a breakdown yet, Madelyn?" he asked, turning to his operations officer.
"It's just coming in now, Sir," Captain Madelyn Gwynett told him. She watched the information come up on her display, and he saw her shoulders tighten.
"Tracking makes it two hundred and forty superdreadnoughts, Sir. At this time, it looks like they're all pod-layers, but we're trying to get drones in closer to confirm that. They've also got what looks like sixteen CLACs and a screen of roughly ninety cruisers and lighter units, as well."
"Thank you, Madelyn."
And from chapter 65:
"How far do you want to close before opening fire, Sir?" Gwynett asked, after a moment, and he looked back down at her. Despite the fact that he and Ayrault were standing right beside her, she had to pitch her voice very low to keep it from being overheard, because it was very quiet on HMS Invictus' flag bridge. Everyone had had time to realize what was going to happen, and fear hung in the background. There was no panic, no hesitation, but they knew what they faced, and the people on that bridge wanted to live just as much as anyone else. The knowledge that they very probably wouldn't was a cold, invisible weight, pressing down upon them.
D'Orville knew it, and he wished there was something he could say or do. Not to make the fear go away, because no one could have done that. But to tell them how much they meant to him, how bitterly he regretted taking them on this death ride.
"We have to make them count," he told Gwynett, equally quietly. "We know our accuracy and penaids are better, but we've still got to get in close. They're going to bury us whenever we open fire, and according to the recon drones, every single one of their wallers is a pod design. They aren't going to face the same 'use them or lose them' constraints we are.
"So we're either going to wait until they open fire, or else until the range drops to sixty-five million klicks."
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Fri Nov 11, 2022 7:49 pm

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It appears that what Donkey did was reduce the interval between salvos to something like 12 seconds instead of a minute. Which basically compressed 5 minutes of fire into a minute.

We've already seen that against first line RMN SD(P)s that 25,000 missiles will cause the destruction of 1-2 SD(P)s per salvo. The majority of Home fleet were no modern SD(P)s, so assume 2-4 per 25,000. So 100,000 missiles will kill 1-2 SD(P)s and 6-12 SDs or BCs.

Which means about 6-8 normal salvos to destroy the fleet, probably by 4 only limited ships will be combat effective.

A second wave arriving closely behind it would greatly reduce the CM effectiveness and force more of the load to be on the laser clusters. So I'd guess twice as many kills for the second and third wave, but there is no ability to reset targets or adapt to something bad. In the event the limitations didn't matter. So 2-4 SD(P) and 12-24 SD/BCs. So the Donkey reduces the number of salvos needed to destroy the fleet by probably 2.

Now you might ask 'how come Haven can fire salvos at 10-15 second intervals and the RMN needs to wait a minute?'

Fair question. It's all plot, all the way down.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Nov 12, 2022 12:11 am

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kzt wrote:Nope. The pods are inside the wedge and sidewalls. So they are only damaged if the ship they are on is hit. What they do is limit the ability of the fleet to defend itself against missiles. So if the incoming missiles are not a real threat they can ignore them. And at long range they are not a real threat unless 2nd starts firing a LOT of missiles.


That's only the limpeted pods, which aren't ready to fire. They need to be launched from the hull before firing. If you want to build up a good-sized Alpha Strike, you need to deploy a lot of pods. There's a limit to how many pods you can launch off from your hull and tractor per unit of time. That's more than a pod-superdreadnought can push through their pod bay doors, but it's still a finite number. And once they're deployed and tractored, they're outside the wedge and can be killed by proximity kills.

All that said, D'Orville should have done it. He had enough notice of Second Fleet arriving that he could have deployed all of his pods, or at least as many as he had control links for, maybe with a bit more margin where the missiles wouldn't just be wasted. He only fired 20% of his ammo.

That actually brings me to something I thought of today: is there a technical reason why Kuzak couldn't have pre-deployed pods? We discussed that she didn't have limpeted pods to her hulls; can someone confirm that? If so, all she had were the internal magazines.

She was at the terminus and she HAD to get back to the Manticore-A component in the least time possible. She did choose to do the dogleg course to make sure she did, which meant two 3.5-light-hour segments, each comprising of acceleration and deceleration. But if she did deploy pods, those would be tractored outside her hulls, which meant her SD(P)s would have lower acceleration. Could this be the reason she chose to not deploy pods? Remember when she left the Terminus, Fifth Fleet had not arrived, so the only known hostile force was Second Fleet, inside the hyperlimit and outnumbering Home Fleet 4:1 and outgunning them by more than that.

Honor did run the risk of being late by taking the direct course and therefore being off from her planned emergence point. She also chose to have a big punch ASAP versus arriving sooner. We know this was the better choice.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Sat Nov 12, 2022 4:36 am

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
That actually brings me to something I thought of today: is there a technical reason why Kuzak couldn't have pre-deployed pods? We discussed that she didn't have limpeted pods to her hulls; can someone confirm that? If so, all she had were the internal magazines.

She was at the terminus and she HAD to get back to the Manticore-A component in the least time possible. She did choose to do the dogleg course to make sure she did, which meant two 3.5-light-hour segments, each comprising of acceleration and deceleration. But if she did deploy pods, those would be tractored outside her hulls, which meant her SD(P)s would have lower acceleration. Could this be the reason she chose to not deploy pods? Remember when she left the Terminus, Fifth Fleet had not arrived, so the only known hostile force was Second Fleet, inside the hyperlimit and outnumbering Home Fleet 4:1 and outgunning them by more than that.

Honor did run the risk of being late by taking the direct course and therefore being off from her planned emergence point. She also chose to have a big punch ASAP versus arriving sooner. We know this was the better choice.

Yes. Plot. David apparently couldn’t be bothered to come up with a reasonable plan, so he had Kuzak and her staff passing around the crack pipe and methodically throw away every advantage that they had. Which her staff helpfully went through before she giggled and said, “What’s the dumbest plan you can think of? Lets do that!”

Ok, maybe I made that quote up. Call it fake but accurate.

It’s the Awful Book due to only partially to everyone on the RMN side other then Honor having taken up crack smoking, but it’s a big reason.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by tlb   » Sat Nov 12, 2022 1:43 pm

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kzt wrote:Nope. The pods are inside the wedge and sidewalls. So they are only damaged if the ship they are on is hit. What they do is limit the ability of the fleet to defend itself against missiles. So if the incoming missiles are not a real threat they can ignore them. And at long range they are not a real threat unless 2nd starts firing a LOT of missiles.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's only the limpeted pods, which aren't ready to fire. They need to be launched from the hull before firing. If you want to build up a good-sized Alpha Strike, you need to deploy a lot of pods. There's a limit to how many pods you can launch off from your hull and tractor per unit of time. That's more than a pod-superdreadnought can push through their pod bay doors, but it's still a finite number. And once they're deployed and tractored, they're outside the wedge and can be killed by proximity kills.

There is not that long a time period between moving the pods from inside the wedge to outside. As long as that time is less than the time of flight of enemy missiles, then there should not be any concern about proximity kills. The main concern is that pods outside the wedge decrease the ship's acceleration.

The question I have is about the hyperspace jump (including the wormhole transition): does that affect either a pod tractored to the hull or one tractored at a distance? Is that a reason for Kuzak's failure?
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Sat Nov 12, 2022 2:43 pm

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tlb wrote:The question I have is about the hyperspace jump (including the wormhole transition): does that affect either a pod tractored to the hull or one tractored at a distance? Is that a reason for Kuzak's failure?

Well, to answer your question:
"Hyper footprint!" Spiropoulo said suddenly. "Multiple hyper footprints at seven-two-point-niner-three million kilometers!"
* * *
Honor Alexander-Harrington's eyes were brown ice as Theophile Kgari, in a virtuoso display of astrogation, dropped the massed superdreadnoughts of Eighth Fleet exactly where she'd told him to in a single jump right out of the center of the resonance zone.
She didn't look at the pathetic remnants of Third Fleet's icons. Didn't even glance at the other icons, representing Lester Tourville's task force. She had attention only for Genevieve Chin's superdreadnoughts, and her voice was a frozen soprano sword.
"Engage the enemy, Andrea," Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington said.
* * *
...
Eighth Fleet released the five thousand Apollo pods which had been tractored to its SD(P)s' hulls, then spent another three minutes rolling additional pods. In all, it deployed a total of 7,776, almost exactly half its total ammunition allotment, given the Andermani ships' lighter magazine capacity.
Then it fired.

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Re: Pod layers.
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sat Nov 12, 2022 4:48 pm

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tlb wrote:The question I have is about the hyperspace jump (including the wormhole transition): does that affect either a pod tractored to the hull or one tractored at a distance? Is that a reason for Kuzak's failure?


They shouldn't be able to make a hyper transition with pods outside of the hull. We know the generators don't extend more than a handful of km from the hull. MNS Thunder of God could ferry the Masadan LACs to Yeltsin's Star only because they were limpeted to the hull.

But kzt's quote blows part of my argument out of the water.

kzt wrote:Well, to answer your question:
Eighth Fleet released the five thousand Apollo pods which had been tractored to its SD(P)s' hulls, then spent another three minutes rolling additional pods. In all, it deployed a total of 7,776, almost exactly half its total ammunition allotment, given the Andermani ships' lighter magazine capacity.
Then it fired.



Eighth Fleet had five thousand pods tractored to the hulls, which meant that they were placed there in the time it took Eighth Fleet to go from its exercise area to the Trevor's Star terminus, then the time the first ships waited for the last ones, plus probably some time in hyperspace. But it also tells us that the ships managed to push an additional 2500 pods in 3 minutes, so that means the 5000 ones they had tractored were only 6 minutes of work. That really means they were limited by the time it takes to tractor them properly to the hull, otherwise they'd have had more (those were all Keyhole II ships, so they had plenty of control links).

And Honor had more time than Kuzak did, several hours more. This tells me that Kuzak couldn't have loaded the Eighth's resupply on her hulls in the time, as I argued above. But it does mean Kuzak could have rolled some pods of her own and trsactored them, without affecting her fleet's acceleration. The question is only how many that was and if it made a difference. Maybe she did that, but it was only a tithe compared to what her Alpha Strike really was.

However, the big problem is that the text tells us the max throughput through the pod bay doors is quite high: if Eighth pushed out 2500 pods out of 35 SD(P)s in 3 minutes, that's ~23 pods per ship per minute. If they come out 4 at a time (4 rails), that's one quartet deployed every 10 seconds. Third Fleet's ships were older than Eighth's (more Medusas) but she had more ships. Even if I give Third Fleet half the rate of Eighth because of that and because maybe Honor removed the safety limiters, 55 ships can kick 660 pods out per minute.
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