hanuman wrote:Amaroq wrote:
I see your points. It just seems a little risky to start the battle with your weaker ships and then potentially have to scramble to salvage things if the CAs couldn't get it done. Especially, when you consider that the system they were defending was of such importance.
I still don't really understand the motive for not trying to get the most effective attack in first (which would hopefully force the Sollies' surrender). From the MoH quote that Hutch provided the Nikes were going to run the attack before the Apollo pods got there. It was only afterwards that the ops plan switched to the CAs running it with the BCs in a pincer role.
I can't remember whether Michelle specifically mentioned it in her pre-battle planning sessions, but didn't it have something to do with wanting to demonstrate to the Sollies exactly how outclassed they are militarily?
As has already been pointed out, Mike’s primary objective was to get Crandall to surrender, hopefully without killing any more people (even Sollies) than she had to.
She actually had a better idea of how effective the Mark 23 was likely to prove than Captain Zavala had about the effectiveness of the Mark 16 in Storm from the Shadows, but she hadn’t allowed herself to plan on that level of effectiveness against Battle Fleet superdreadnoughts based on the performance of Frontier Fleet battlecruisers at New Tuscany. Her battle plan allowed for Crandall's antimissile defenses to do substantially better than they did, yet she never doubted for a moment that she could completely destroy Crandall’s fleet if she had to. For that matter, there was very little question in her mind that the Saganami-Cs in orbit around the planet could have done the job without any additional support using those Mark 23 missile pods.
It was always possible, however, that Dame Estelle might not have been able to goad Crandall into that "maddened bull" charge directly into Terekhov's engagement basket, and the Nikes would have been much more capable of looking out for themselves if Crandall had been smart enough early on to break off her approach to the planet. If she’d begun accelerating at right angles to her base vector the instant she detected Maik’s alpha translation, she could have pushed the engagement envelope to a range from the Mark 23s deployed in planetary orbit at which Tenth Fleet’s inability to use Apollo’s FTL capabilities would have severely degraded the amount of damage which could be inflicted. It would have been Crandall’s best bet — assuming she’d been prescient enough to take advantage of it — of getting her fleet out intact and un-surrendered, neither of which was an acceptable outcome from Mike's perspective.
By using the heavy cruisers, who had more than enough control links to handle devastating salvos because each of those links was controlling an entire pod of missiles, as the anvil, she was able to retain the larger and more flexible battlecruisers as the heaviest possible hammer if she needed it. Moreover, there was a psychological element involved. If Crandall realized what heavy cruisers had done to her after the first Mark 23 salvo or so arrived, then she’d probably be a lot more worried about what battlecruisers (which were bigger than any damned battlecruiser she’d ever seen before) could do to her when they came up her backside.
The bottom line was that Mike needed something to use as the anvil and something to use as the hammer and for the reasons given above, she chose to use the Saganami-Cs as the stationary force and the Nikes as the mobile one.
Does that help any?
I want some butts!