Tenshinai wrote:If Honor had been first out of the junction, she would have had no warning, the ambush would then have a far greater chance at being highly lethal.
Sure, if she also took up smoking crack. (edit - note that 8th had 5000 pods externally carried, unlike 3rd which didn't have any for reasons.)
As soon as she merges from hyper she is deep inside effective Apollo range. So even if she didn't bother to have ships stack pods first (which is both possible and standard RMN tactics) she can start firing. She fires every 24 seconds for 4 minutes. When those missiles arrive pretty much every single ship in 2nd dies. Note that she is still outside the RZ.
Oops, they are closing so I'll continue this later.
Later:
So she is outside the RZ and waiting for her missiles to blow up 2nd fleet. Now the obvious issue is what will 2nd fleet do about this little problem they have, or will have in some period of time I don't feel like trying to calculate, but likely to be about 12-15 minutes.
Now if they can determine that these missiles are all Apollo they have a really serious chance of just surrendering, because even if they survive this attack their are plenty more missiles left. This is, from the view of 8th, ideal.
Otherwise they can try to build another massive salvo (if the donkey's survived the missile swarm - which they probably didn't) or can immediately start shooting back. It's going to require a ballistic component from them, so due to reasons accuracy will be terrible. Given that at Solon a tiny little piece of 8th fleet absorbed salvos of 11,000 missiles without significant damage I don't think that will work out well for 2nd and they probably know that. Or they can shoot at Spinx. Not much that you can do about that, though that would result in Spinx firing at 2nd too.
Anyhow, worst case is that they send another huge salvo at 8th, so let's figure out how to handle this. The obvious options are to absorb it (which seems kind of a questionable plan) or to evade it (which seems like a better plan) so we'll work that out.
There are two way to evade it. First you can do what Chin planed for 5th fleet, which is just move. Assuming Chin and her staff isn't amazingly stupid, moving 50,000 km off target will result in the MDMs being able to engage. So 8th can accelerate in a random direction along the RZ and likely prevent any damage.
However, it's possible that Chin and her staff were mistaken and the missiles will reaquire their targets. In that case the obvious way to evade is to jump into hyper. Given the velocity difference between 2nd and 8th and the greater accleration from RMN missiles and the need for 2nd to coordinate fire there should be at least a minute between the first RMN missile strikes and the first RHN missile salvos arriving, plus the next few one or two will be all set. So 8th kills 40+ of 2nd, then hypers out and the remaining salvos kill another dozen or so ships if they are lucky. However, 2nd is now pretty much out of ammo....
However there is a sneakier way to do this. Remember that each KH2 can control the firepower of an entire squadron? So you have one ship from each squadron go into hyper ASAP and maneuvers opposite the planned fleet move. They will pop out of hyper as soon as 8th goes into hyper and assume command of the missiles in flight.
Assuming that 2nd tries to activate the trap plan, how long do you think it takes for 2nd to hyper in? 3 minutes? 5 minutes? We'll assume 3 minutes. It appears that 5th was supposed to come close to the RZ but actually came out ~12 million KM out. That's about 2.5 minutes of missile flight. Hyperdrive time to activate is 4 minutes. So 8th has to absorb the 11,000 missile salvos they faced a Solon with 26 SDs instead of 2 SDs and a few BCs for a minute and a half - at Solon that took no essentially no damage, why would it be that different here?. (Though they have to do it without LACs - either because they don't have them or because they are all deployed along the threat vector for 2nd.)
During this time they will be shooting back, with Apollo. Remember those 5000 pods that 8th fleet had externally tractored while maneuvering and transiting the WHJ?
So 5th dies a horrible death and 8th hypers out to avoid the rest of the (unguided) missile stream from 5th. At which point the other 6 SDs (which have been in hyper for at least three minutes) hyper back in several million KMs away and take over the missiles heading for 2nd.
