A question about the destruction of Admiral Filareta

HB of CJ wrote:Yep..me too. To the point where I re read that part about 3 different times thinking there was something I missed. Nope. Just consider it a major goof that does happen from time to time writing science fiction space opera shoot 'em ups.

All the excellent reasons already given why. No need to add except that Honor had all the time in the world to re establish communication with the next admiral in line and get him/her to self destruct all the incoming Sollie missiles.

My belief is that the Sollie onslaught, like most or all navies offensive missiles, MUST have redundant self destruct systems built into them, if for no other reason than to keep bad accidents from happening ... which is kinda what happened.

HB of CJ (old coot) Lt.Cm.

Why should Honor assume that (a) there was any reason to contact a second admiral, (b) that the aforementioned second admiral would have listened to her if Filaretta obviously hadn't, (c) that she even knew how to get in touch with this hypothetical individual, or (d) that she had "all the time in the world" to do it?

She didn't know anything had happened to Filaretta or his flag bridge. All she knew was that the admiral to whom she'd been talking had cut his communications with her and launched a hellacious number of missiles. There was absolutely no reason for her to think he'd been suddenly killed or that the missiles had been launched without proper command authority. She also had no way of judging how effective any DDMs coming at her might be. She could safely assume they would be far, far less effective than GA missiles would have been, but she had an enormous number of them inbound and --- as Tom Theisman pointed out --- no possible moral justification for risking her own personnel's lives to save those of people who'd come expressly to invade her star system and been the first to open fire.

The entire notion that anyone on the Sollies' side could have reacted in time to (a) realize what had happened to Filaretta's flag bridge, (b) alert his next in command about it, (c) shift tactical control to the new senior officer, and (d) self-destruct the missiles is, quite simply, ludicrous. One of the factors most often overlooked in bad military fiction is the human reaction-response time limitation. It takes time to simply transmit information, and at each stage in the process, that information had to be evaluated before the proper authority at that stage can determine what to do in response to it.

Following the battle between the Chesapeake and the Shannon in the War of 1812, a midshipman --- I believe he was only about 13 years old --- was court-martialed and dismissed the service for deserting his post. His crime had been to drag his mortally wounded captain below decks to the surgeons. Unfortunately, in the short interval he was below decks, every officer senior to him was killed or incapacitated, and command of the ship devolved upon him. Except he wasn't on deck to assume it because he was trying to save his captain's life. At the Battle of Jutland, Admiral Beatty's flagship survived only because a mortally wounded turret officer got the order to seal the magazine's flash-tight scuttles to the magazine crew in time. The timing was so close that they found members of the crew dead, killed by the flash Major Harvey had seen coming, with their hands still on the securing clips. My point is that things move incredibly fast in combat and that human brains, information transmission, and the time required for people to realize what's happening and react to it very, very often fail to keep up with them.

I could give you dozens of more examples --- from Daniel Callaghan's task group in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942 to the night action following Jutland, to mention only two --- where failures in communication and response caused catastrophic results. And none of them resulted from the deliberate destruction of the commanding officer and his entire staff by a saboteur.

Hi Lord Skimper,

Please.

This is a pathetic argument.

There were only 211 LAC's killed by 51,240 DDM's plus ~17,000 broadside missiles; or a ratio of more than 323 to one, ie those that were hit were more by blind bad luck than anything deliberate, more like they couldn't get out of the way; also ignoring the fact that ratio of SLN missiles was closer to the number needed to kill an SD than a LAC [they easily cost more than the LAC], and those missiles could attack anything within 30,000 km or more.

If the LAC's were doing their duty in the face of such a missile storm, they were going to take casualties.

The fact that only 211 were lost impressed me with the dramatic improvement since BoMA 11 month's before.

The fact that some posters can find something to complain about in such incredible improvement isn't a surprise.

Although its about as a silly a piece as the premise of this thread.

L

Lord Skimper wrote:From the text we know that the main bridge was destroyed. We don't know if the backup bridge was. The bomb wasn't silent on the ship. Would make a huge noise. Two bombs set off from one place or taking out the communications room might be a better bet.

However the delay and follow up attack meant someone did take over and did press the attack. Remember this is the biggest most powerful fleet ever assembled. So big not even Manticore could destroy it in even a 2 million plus missile exchange that totally overwhelmed them. A shame that 250,000 of those 2 million couldn't have CMed the incoming attack salvo. Would have saved 2-300 LAC.

This! Absolutely.

Not to mention that the 2nd is unlikely to be privy at this point to all the conversations, explained threats, terms in the preceding contacts between Adm Alexander-Harrington and Adm Filareta.

Further recall...Adm Filareta was supposed to have above average, and definitely secretly more well-informed, judgement...than a typical Battle Fleet admiral.

munroburton wrote:His second in command was on another ship. Filareta's flagship wasn't outwardly affected. It's going to take at least a minute for his flag captain to realise flag bridge is gone, get on the com and contact the second in command.

Who, by this point, is preoccupied by the incoming return fire. There simply wasn't time for them to catch up and override their missiles, re-establish contact with the GA(one of the downside of using those FTL relay drones, the enemy's second in command can't tap in), convince them to abort their own missiles as well and then surrender the largest fleet in history.

Until Filareta's death was confirmed, it's probable that nobody would've overridden the flagship. That's why their surrender didn't happen until after it was destroyed and command unquestionably fell onto another admiral's shoulders.

If the secondary flagship was destroyed as well, nobody alive would know what had happened. That information simply wouldn't have disseminated and the SLN clearly never developed the need for something like the Code Omega protocol from Starfire.

Honor castigated herself for the slaughter of Filareta's fleet. Empress Elizabeth and the commanders have a discussion about why Filareta did not surrender. It must have been Mesan nano-tech programming again. They discuss the delay in the follow-up broadside salvoes (thirteen seconds). Honors says that she could have let the missiles come. We could have taken them, she said. Thomas Theisman tells her that she should be court marshaled if she were to do such a thing:

“You didn’t have any choice,” he told her. “Not with fifty thousand missiles coming at your command.”
“I could have just taken the fire,” Honor replied flatly. “Look at how few people we lost anyway! I could’ve waited to be sure—”
“Oh, stop it!” Thomas Theisman snapped, and Honor’s head snapped around in surprise at the genuine anger in his voice.
“No, you could not have ‘just taken the fire’!” the Republic’s secretary of war told her sharply. “And if you had done something that stupid, you’d deserve to be broken for it!”
“But—”
“Don’t you ‘but’ me! You didn’t know—you couldn’t know—if they’d come up with some kind of fire-control fix we’d never heard of before. You had no right, not one shred of a moral justification, to risk the lives of personnel under your command just because somebody on the other side had done something suicidal! Your responsibility is to your people, not theirs!"

See Chapter 24 of A Rising Thunder.

They couldn't know. They had 50,000 missiles inbound. They had to return fire.

Lord Skimper wrote:From the text we know that the main bridge was destroyed. We don't know if the backup bridge was. The bomb wasn't silent on the ship. Would make a huge noise. Two bombs set off from one place or taking out the communications room might be a better bet.

In point of fact, the bridge was not destroyed. The FLAG BRIDGE was destroyed. There is no on-board second location for that. See SVW. The backup in the command chain is on some other ship, in a different squadron, and probably in a different task group.

Before any transfer of authority would take place, since the flagship was not destroyed outright and visibly, the flagship captain would have to determine a) what had happened on his ship, b) whether Adm Filareta was truly dead or incapacitated, c) make the appropriate signal to the next ranking flag officer, d) explain the loss of the CO (admittedly, "he's dead" would suffice, but this is Battle Fleet - there would be useless follow-up questions), and e) explain the status or negotiations and why the missile pods had been flushed...which he didn't know. All of the above would have to occur in the few minutes before the salvos of missiles arrived on either side, while the both the flagship captain and the contacted admiral were slightly engaged in trying to fight a desperately one-sided battle to survive.

Where do you come up with this stuff, LS??

dreamrider

dreamrider wrote:

Lord Skimper wrote:From the text

Where do you come up with this stuff, LS??

dreamrider

In another thread 2 days ago he admitted, admitted, that his books are boxed up and he doesn't even bother to read them to figure anything out.

So, where does he come up with this stuff?

Where the sun don't shine.

I think the text says it all, that there was about a ten second lapse after the massive pod fired launch went out.

In between, I imagine that the signal that went out "from the flag" was "fire everything", at which point all the SLN captains, etc. tell their tac officers "Holy s---", the admiral just sent the cascade order", and every tac officer in the SLN hits their fire and forget button.

Then, lightspeed moments later, the Flag Bridge blows the heck up, which you doesn't take your tac officer's finger off the button he already pushed, sending the remaining missiles on their way.

Nothing in the text says that the Mantie communication to the flag bridge was broadcast on identifiable frequencies to all of the SLN ships fleet wide.

So who's supposed to give a fleet wide surrender to Harrington in the mean time because Filereta et. all have not told any individual ship captains how badly they've been outclassed? Filerata himself is in shock about it and realizes that he has to surrender, and he's supposed to be "the smart cookie".

And then, like Theisman says, it was Honor's job to destroy the enemy, not take their fire. She does so, and then captures whatevers left.

It wouldn't suprise me to find a secondary string had been set to that bow to screw with the flag ships communications as well.
We'll probably never know but it seems reasonable.

SWM wrote:No one would have been able to assume command in that situation, in the few minutes available.

actually they did - that's why the fleet turned to bring their broadsides to action and got off some shots (as I remember reading). His 2nd in command took over when they were unable to establish contact with the flag to find out "what the #*@$ he was thinking". It seams to me that they could have just as easily ordered "strike the wedge" - unless they had some nanospy as-well.

MAD-4A wrote:

SWM wrote:No one would have been able to assume command in that situation, in the few minutes available.

actually they did - that's why the fleet turned to bring their broadsides to action and got off some shots (as I remember reading). His 2nd in command took over when they were unable to establish contact with the flag to find out "what the #*@$ he was thinking". It seams to me that they could have just as easily ordered "strike the wedge" - unless they had some nanospy as-well.

Pfft. Turn broadsides to bear - which is something they'd instinctively do just to bring point defense to bear - and start firing, is simply carrying on the situation as the next admiral saw it. Having time to think and communicate and consider wild hypotheses just didn't obtain in that situation. It was all reflex action. No need to ring in more nanotech, especially since the nanotech doesn't really suffice to have someone start giving natural-sounding orders responsive to the situation.