in some ways was houseman right?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Compare that to the old Legislaturalist corps. Parnell managed to lose over a dozen SDs in mostly intact conditions during Third Yeltsin.

Theemile wrote:Don't forget, Yeltsin is in a 1 light month wide Grav Wave. if those ships lost a single alpha node, they couldn't jump into hyper immediately at the hyper limit, and would have to run 10-20 days in normal space to hit the edge of the wave to escape - with an enemy who outnumbered them and could jump ahead of them. No doubt, this was the reason so many surrendered.

tlb wrote:

Theemile wrote:Don't forget, Yeltsin is in a 1 light month wide Grav Wave. if those ships lost a single alpha node, they couldn't jump into hyper immediately at the hyper limit, and would have to run 10-20 days in normal space to hit the edge of the wave to escape - with an enemy who outnumbered them and could jump ahead of them. No doubt, this was the reason so many surrendered.

So the Ghosts would need sails as well as the hyper-generator to leave on their own after Oyster Bay.

Theemile wrote:Don't forget, Yeltsin is in a 1 light month wide Grav Wave. if those ships lost a single alpha node, they couldn't jump into hyper immediately at the hyper limit, and would have to run 10-20 days in normal space to hit the edge of the wave to escape - with an enemy who outnumbered them and could jump ahead of them. No doubt, this was the reason so many surrendered.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Completely true, but that doesn't negate the fact that he did lose that many ships. The grav wave was not a surprise: knowing when to withdraw needs to be part of the planning for the attack.

Chapter 24 wrote:He nibbled harder. The master plan envisioned hitting Yeltsin in overwhelming force for the express purpose of isolating and destroying any Manty units stationed there as the first step in demoralizing and grinding away the RMN. If Caparelli really had pulled four squadrons out, then the size of the prize had been cut roughly in half, assuming their original estimates of the Yeltsin deployment were accurate, and he hated to give up the extra kills. On the other hand, the morale effect might be even greater, since a smaller force might well be completely annihilated without any substantial Havenite losses. And a part of him would actually prefer to go in against relatively weaker opposition until he'd had a chance to evaluate the technical differential firsthand. Available combat reports indicated it was at least as bad as he'd feared, possibly even worse, which made it tempting to stack the numerical odds as heavily in his favor as he could until he knew for certain.

Chapter 33 wrote:Amos Parnell sat in his office off DuQuesne Base's central war room and stared in sick horror at his terminal. The stocky, powerful CNO seemed shrunken, aged beyond his years, and his face was haggard.
His task force had returned to the Barnett System less than ten hours ago after its agonizingly slow passage from Yeltsin and what he supposed historians would call the Battle of Yeltsin. "Massacre of Yeltsin" would be more appropriate, and it was his fault. He'd taken the Manties' bait hook, line, and sinker.
He closed his eyes, covering his face with his hands, and knew he was a beaten man. Not just by the Manties, but inside. He'd gone into Yeltsin believing he had a three-to-one advantage, only to find himself facing a force even stronger than his own, and somehow the Manties and their allies had been able to preposition their powered-down wall of battle perfectly. It was as if they'd been clairvoyant, as if they'd been able to see every move he made in real time.
Their opening broadsides had taken him totally by surprise. A quarter of his fleet had been crippled or destroyed almost before he knew the enemy was there, and he had no idea how he'd extricated anything from the deadly trap. He couldn't remember. No doubt he could replay the com records and flag bridge recorders and reconstruct his orders, but he had absolutely no coherent memory of giving them. It was all a hideous nightmare of lightning-fast decisions and desperate improvisation that had somehow fought clear of Yeltsin with barely half the ships he'd taken into it, and half of them had been so battered their return to Barnett had taken more than twice as long as the passage out.

Chapter 26 wrote:Amos Parnell would never have become Chief of Naval Operations under the old regime if he hadn't been a Legislaturalist, but he'd been extremely good at the job, however he'd gotten it. When she first accepted her Grayson commission, Honor had had a chance to read the classified reports of the Third Battle of Yeltsin, and she'd been deeply impressed by Parnell's performance there. Lured into what was for all intents and purposes a deep-space ambush, then jumped by more than twice the firepower he'd expected to confront, all under the command of no less a tactician than Hamish Alexander, he'd still gotten half his fleet out intact.

tlb wrote:I am curious why this says "deep space" ambush, which makes it sound as though the battle occurred outside the hyper-limit. Also "intact" does not seem to fit the earlier description.

tlb wrote:His intelligence was faulty and the RMN played into that by powering down the wedges of the extra ships until he was too far within the hyper-limit. The first he knew of the correct odds was when a quarter of his fleet was shot up.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:It sounds like using more recon drones would have helped, but there must have been more to it than this. Not sending drones would be SLN-level arrogance; Parnell was better than that. Though everyone at this time was fighting using SLN tactics.

But anyway, my argument was that, however good he was at extricating himself, he put himself into that position and he trusted said faulty intelligence. He was a good tactician, but apparently not so good a strategian.

Jonathan_S wrote:Remember that at this point, and even somewhat later such as at 4th Yeltsin, RD were short ranged and very difficult to get through the defenses of an alert fleet. (Because they were so short ranged that against a maneuvering opponent you had to launch them so late that the opponent would see that launch (making it very hard for them to hide)

So if White Haven's extra ships had been close enough to the visible portion of his fleet Parnell would have had to send enough RDs to basically overwhelm White Haven's point defenses to get some close enough to pick up the extra hidden ships. And so it seems people generally didn't bother. Despite Honor's initial unorthodox messy formation at 4th Yeltsin Admiral Thurstin didn't bother to expend them to confirm what he was seeing.

So maybe by even that point in the war Admirals were simply not in the habit of checking their route of advance, or the enemy formations, with RDs...

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
At this point in time, they actually used destroyers for scouts. Destroyers are faster than fleet formation, but not by much. Not enough to pass a warning to avoid engagement, even if the destroyer could get into enough range to get the intel.

In any case, I'm going to double down on "Parnell was not a good strategian". We had a thread about whether he was picking from the Noveau Paris School of Convoluted War-fighting Planning (which probably co-hosted the Imperial Stoormtrooper Shooting Academy).