Somehow I fell several days behind in this thread, hope no one minds me belatedly replying to this tangent.
cthia wrote:The missile system was taken off the table. It was part of Pritchart's original offer in MOH. And since ART indicated no diferent I assumed it remained the status quo.
And again I am aware of the strategic and tactical objectives. I just fail to see why those objectives could not have been met in the same manner that Honor forced the surrender of so many of Tourville's ships.
They had the enemy's playbook and knew his probable approach vector.
Why couldn't Honor have placed her ships out of probable SLN reach?
Same Manticore system. Same channel. Same available weapons.
Only the arsehole changed!
IMHO!
Well one major difference is that Haven already had direct experience on how deadly Apollo missile were when used against Republic forces - The BoM wasn't their first use.
So once Honor demonstrated (or more accurately bluffed) that she had the range to use those missiles, using a relative handful Tourville honored the threat. He knew from past combat that his ships couldn't survive against a full Apollo strike, and that he wasn't able to carry through the mission before losing all his ships. But without that first hand experience of RHN ships being crushed by ridiculously small numbers of Apollo missiles I can't imagine he'd be willing to surrender just because a few missiles flew through his formation without causing any damage.
Filareta hasn't had that same knowledge forceably impressed upon him. Even the battle of Spindle didn't use Apollo to it's full effect, and because of communication lag he doesn't have full reports on that battle anyway - mostly just the Manticoran version which he's not going to fully trust.
So first I think Honor would have had to use a
much heavier demonstration launch, several thousand missiles minimum, to have a hope of making the necessary impression. And nothing is stopping Filereta from launching his Cataphracts (this time with better initial targeting) shortly before the Apollo demonstration rounds reach his fleet.
Upside: the cataphracts are launching from further out, so their targeting will be less accurate. Downside: they're going to be coming in ballistic, so you won't have much of an idea where they are before the surprisingly quick (but short ranged) CM upper stage drive lights off; so your active defenses are going to be caught flatfooted from anything that flies by close enough to detect and engage you. Worse, without a big obvious semi-close target (like the combined fleets) you've no guarantee what those cataphracts will be targeted at. Sphinx planetary defenses? Manticore defenses? Asteroid mining nodes? The fleets hanging way back?
Plus you've just burned a lot of irreplaceable (at least temporarily) missiles for no gain; a demonstration that just caused a use it or lose it launch before it made its point. (I'm assuming the SLN might launch late enough that even with FTL Honors ships could be too far back to order the missiles to switch from demonstration to attack in time)
Although I think KNick missed one thing. Filereta hypered in close enough that I'm almost certain that if the system defense pods had launched immediately that they could have swamped his ships and obliterated them before their hyper generators could cycle, while they were temporarily stuck in normal space. But to do that they'd have to fire immediately, there would be no time to demand a surrender.
And there are good reasons, beyond that one immediate battle, to ask for surrender. And even bigger long term advantages (military, psychological, and diplomatic) if they'd forced a no shots fired surrender of that many SLN ships and men.
