tlb wrote:None of that answers the point that it would have been a disaster if Honor had been on one of her raids when the Battle of Manticore took place. Manticore would have lost if her fleet was not available to act when it did. Which is the point being made that her ships needed to be available for home guard, at least until the Apollo system defense pods were in place. Home defense is NOT a waste of money, it is a vital part of any strategic plan. As others have pointed out, once Apollo was revealed there was a window of vulnerability until it was in general use and Haven very nearly capitalized on that fact.
Is there any question that the Sphinx defenses would have engaged rather than surrender the entire system? They had plenty of pods, even if they weren't Apollo (or weren't equipped to control Apollo). They had forts capable of deploying and controlling those pods as well as taking on huge external loads of pods. If they'd had any sense at all - and Caparelli did seem to - they'd have loaded up on external pods and started moving as far from Sphinx as they could in the time available. Even if 10g is as fast as they can go, they could have opened up a pretty good safety margin before 2nd fleet got in range. Moving a million km to system north would mean that even max range MDMs wouldn't be a danger to the planet, and forts could do that in 90 minutes or less.