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Battle of Spindle

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Battle of Spindle
Post by Isilith   » Wed Feb 13, 2019 4:15 pm

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Does the Battle of Spindle ( Mike vs crandall ) actually get described in any of the books? If so, which one? I can't seem to find, or remember at any rate, anything but off screen references to it.
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by Alamo   » Wed Feb 13, 2019 4:24 pm

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Mission of Honor, I believe.

From the wiki entry:

While Alexander-Harrington is trying for a negotiated peace settlement with Haven, the Royal Manticoran Navy's 10th fleet led by Vice Admiral Michelle Henke is attacked by a Solarian task force at the Spindle System in the newly incorporated Talbott Quadrant. Admiral Sandra Crandall, commander of the Solarian Force, acting on her own desire for vengeance and Mesan manipulations and bribes demands the surrender of 10th Fleet and arrest of Henke. Baroness Medusa, Governor-General of the Talbott Quadrant, refuses to honor Crandall's demands. The Solarian forces begin their attack run but are ambushed by 10th Fleet in a lopsided victory, despite the fact that Henke has only a few dozen cruiser-sized ships to defend against 73 ships of wall and screening elements. After the destruction of the Solarian flagship and a third of the task force, Crandall's third in command assumes control and surrenders the survivors.
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by tlb   » Wed Feb 13, 2019 6:21 pm

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Isilith wrote:Does the Battle of Spindle ( Mike vs crandall ) actually get described in any of the books? If so, which one? I can't seem to find, or remember at any rate, anything but off screen references to it.

Here is the final moments from Mission of Honor, chapter 22:
Solarian counter-missile doctrine had never envisioned a salvo density like this. Traditional missile defense planning focused on identifying the attack missiles most likely to achieve hits and then targeting each of them with multiple counter-missile launches. But there wasn't going to be time for that in the face of such a ferocious closing velocity. In fact, there would be time for only a single CM launch before the MDMs screamed completely across their engagement envelope, and even taking full advantage of the additional fire control of the Aegis refits a third of Crandall's ships had received, her superdreadnoughts could produce less than two thousand counter-missiles per launch. That was approximately one CM for every 6.5 Mark 23s slicing towards them, which would have been hopelessly inadequate under any circumstances.
Now "inadequate" became "futile" as the control missiles activated their slaved electronic warfare platforms.
Missile defense officers stared in disbelief as their displays went berserk. Dragon's Teeth blossomed like seductive flowers, flooding Task Force 496's fire control with false targets. The number of threat sources doubled, then doubled yet again, and again, hopelessly swamping the Solarian systems' ability to discriminate the true threats from the counterfeit. The computers driving those systems, and the men and women behind those computers, did their best, but their best wasn't good enough.
The incredible horde of false signatures guaranteed the limited number of counter-missiles the Solarians could bring to bear would be effectively useless, but Michelle Henke and her officers had been unwilling to settle for that. Even as the Dragon's Teeth spawned, the Dazzler platforms spread across the front of the attack salvo activated in a carefully sequenced chain, ripping huge, blinding holes in Task Force 496's sensor coverage. The Dazzlers' exquisitely choreographed chaos reduced even the last ditch laser clusters of their targets' point defense systems to impotence.
Of the ninety-two hundred Mark 23 attack birds in Aivars Terekhov's Alpha launch, Sandra Crandall's task force managed to stop exactly one thousand and seven. The other 8,209 got through.
* * *
SLNS Joseph Buckley lurched indescribably as the Manticoran missiles detonated and x-ray lasers ripped at her massive armor.
Thick as that armor was, it was no match for the stilettos of focused radiation punching into it like brimstone awls. It shattered under the transfer energy as the lasers ripped deeper and deeper, and the huge ship bucked in agony.
Jacomina van Heutz clung to the arms of her command chair as her shock frame hammered her. The fleeting instant in which the Manticoran missiles could bring their lasers to bear against her ship's sidewalls as they penetrated the Solarian formation with a closing velocity which had climbed to seventy-three percent of light-speed was far too brief for any of Joseph Buckley's damage to register on merely human senses as individual hits. It was all delivered in one stroboscopic lightning bolt of devastation, too sudden and intense for even the ship's computers to register or sort out.
Those missile-born talons gouged and tore. Energy mounts and missile tubes, counter-missile launchers, radar arrays, point defense clusters, boat bays, gravitic sensors, impeller nodes—all of them shattered, exploding into tattered ruin in a single catastrophic moment, faster than a man could have blinked. In less time than it would have taken to cough, Sandra Crandall's flagship was transformed into a broken wreck, a splintered hulk, coasting onward under momentum alone, with three quarters of her crew wiped out of existence.
Nor did van Heutz' ship die alone. Her squadron mates Joseph Lister, Max Planck, and Joseph Hutton died with her. Like Buckley, Hutton at least avoided immediate and total destruction, but Lister and Planck were less fortunate. Lister shattered, breaking into three distinct pieces; Planck simply disappeared in a flash of white-hot fury.
Archimedes, Andreas Vesalius, Hipparchus, Leonardo da Vinci, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Wilhelm Roëntgen, Alfred Wegener, Avicenna, al-Kawarizmi . . . every one of the Alpha launch's twenty-three targets—thirty-two percent of Crandall's total wall of battle—was reduced to splinters and wreckage in that single inconceivable, exquisitely synchronized explosion.
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by Isilith   » Wed Feb 13, 2019 9:23 pm

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Thank you both!
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by Daryl   » Thu Feb 14, 2019 2:42 am

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Moral of the story is to not serve on a ship called the Joseph Buckley, or even stand next to a Mr Joe Buckley.
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by cthia   » Thu Feb 14, 2019 3:16 am

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Mike took her gloves off in this boxing match. She cheated -- just like her BFF in the ramblings thread. Go figure. LOL

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by tlb   » Thu Feb 14, 2019 10:03 am

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cthia wrote:Mike took her gloves off in this boxing match. She cheated -- just like her BFF in the ramblings thread. Go figure. LOL

What cheat?
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Thu Feb 14, 2019 4:39 pm

TFLYTSNBN

tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:Mike took her gloves off in this boxing match. She cheated -- just like her BFF in the ramblings thread. Go figure. LOL

What cheat?



Deploying a squadron of "mere" Saganami C heavy cruisers along with one geriatric DN to defend Spindle while covertly deploying a freighter full of Apollo pods is sneaky.

Not warning Adm Crandal that the Mark 23 missile is designed to ream Haven SDs which have far better missilr defenses and tougher armor than SLN SDs is decrptive.

Not warning Crandal that even without Keyhole 2 to provide FTL fire control, the Apollo control missiles effectively multiply the number of FC control channels by a factor of 8, and Saggy Cs have far more control channels than they ought to, is just plain diabolical.

Not warning Crandal that all of those recon drones provide FTL sensor readings effectively reduce the control time lag by 50% is just evil.
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by tlb   » Thu Feb 14, 2019 6:55 pm

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cthia wrote:Mike took her gloves off in this boxing match. She cheated -- just like her BFF in the ramblings thread. Go figure. LOL

tlb wrote:What cheat?

TFLYTSNBN wrote: Deploying a squadron of "mere" Saganami C heavy cruisers along with one geriatric DN to defend Spindle while covertly deploying a freighter full of Apollo pods is sneaky.

Not warning Adm Crandal that the Mark 23 missile is designed to ream Haven SDs which have far better missilr defenses and tougher armor than SLN SDs is decrptive.

Not warning Crandal that even without Keyhole 2 to provide FTL fire control, the Apollo control missiles effectively multiply the number of FC control channels by a factor of 8, and Saggy Cs have far more control channels than they ought to, is just plain diabolical.

Not warning Crandal that all of those recon drones provide FTL sensor readings effectively reduce the control time lag by 50% is just evil.

In what way is Adm. Crandall owed any of that? She went to Spindle to arrest those that killed Adm. Byng and assert the dominance of the Solarian League over the neo-barbarians. Just like Crassus' campaign against the Parthian Empire ending in his defeat and death at the Battle of Carrhae or the ambush and destruction of three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest, the SLN was sent into battle without knowing the enemy and without knowing their own weakness.
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Re: Battle of Spindle
Post by Eagleeye   » Thu Feb 14, 2019 11:29 pm

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tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:Mike took her gloves off in this boxing match. She cheated -- just like her BFF in the ramblings thread. Go figure. LOL

What cheat?


TFLYTSNBN wrote:
Deploying a squadron of "mere" Saganami C heavy cruisers along with one geriatric DN to defend Spindle while covertly deploying a freighter full of Apollo pods is sneaky.

Not warning Adm Crandal that the Mark 23 missile is designed to ream Haven SDs which have far better missilr defenses and tougher armor than SLN SDs is decrptive.

Not warning Crandal that even without Keyhole 2 to provide FTL fire control, the Apollo control missiles effectively multiply the number of FC control channels by a factor of 8, and Saggy Cs have far more control channels than they ought to, is just plain diabolical.

Not warning Crandal that all of those recon drones provide FTL sensor readings effectively reduce the control time lag by 50% is just evil.


What makes you belief, that Sandra Crandall, of all people, would have honored any of these hairbrained and unconfirmed prancings of an admiral in a neobarbaric navy? She was settled in the things she knew, and she knew, without any shadow of a doubt, that the SLN was the undisputed Master of the Game. What happened to Byng didn't change that one bit. Byng probably only had a bad day (had probably got up with the wrong leg first) and the Neobarbs were lucky. Pity, but she was at Spindle to set the things right again. And something like these unconfirmed fairy tales wouldn't stop her.

By the way, if Henke did what you proposed, she probably would've been court-martialed (or at least would've faced a court of inquiry) because she deliberately would've given away crucial information about the abilities of the RMN to an adversary, those intentions regarding the Star Empire were at least highly doubtful.
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