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.