OK KZT: What's wrong with AAC?

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Where did you get that number? Because Honor fired at Tourville from 150 million km away and managed to evade all defences and fire at nothing.

The part where honor admits that he was out of range and required relay via hermes buoy?

David has carefully not stated what the max range is, but we have two examples of long range fire and one was in-range and the other would have been autonomous without the hermes buoy. Not that you should discount the autonomous capability of Apollo...

IIRC (don't have those notes handy right now) we're given 2 actual examples of in-range shots (Lovat + McKeon at BoM) plus one simulation where Michelle's BCs are granted a theoretical Apollo upgrade for that simulation (and it's possible that the range of the simulation's Apollo was also tweaked)


And as noted this is a range that seems based on the FTL tranciever capabilities of the current Mk23E and may improve over time.

tlb wrote:

cthia wrote:If you truly want Honor to get into Home Fleets bailiwick, then why the hell are you giving Hamish a hard time for doing the same?

This is not the first time that a fleet at Trevor's Star has had as its main task providing backup for Home Fleet; as Hamish well knows, since he was the commander then. Note that after the one sortie, that is what the Admiralty appears to have ordered Honor's fleet to do.

The "hard time" that I gave Hamish was for not arguing that the sortie would be better held until Apollo (particularly the system defense variant) was in wider deployment. I felt that he was offensive minded and so did not initially appreciate the position that Home Fleet faced. However the Admiralty must have prevailed by limiting Honor to the one sortie.

Wanting to wait until Apollo was in wider deployment is not indecisiveness; it is discretion - the better part of valor.

Probably won't be the last time either. Each force deployed about the galaxy is simply an extension of the 3D map represented by the Holotank, arranged and rearranged by the Admiralty as needed. Bottom line is that 8th Fleet was not created to babysit Home Fleet. And, you simply mustn't allow indeciveness to paralyze you.

Do note that 8th Fleet can be caught sorely out of position as well, when it is on its way to checkmate Pritchard.

Stalemate?

Regardless of the possibility, you can't afford to paralyze yourself.

ThinksMarkedly wrote: Where did you get that number? Because Honor fired at Tourville from 150 million km away and managed to evade all defences and fire at nothing.

kzt wrote:The part where honor admits that he was out of range and required relay via hermes buoy?

David has carefully not stated what the max range is, but we have two examples of long range fire and one was in-range and the other would have been autonomous without the hermes buoy. Not that you should discount the autonomous capability of Apollo...

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The Hermes buoy was used for communication, not for missile control.

True, we don't know if that 9 missiles would have hit anything if they wanted to and if the defences were up, but they were in sufficient control to convince Tourville that he had better give up and surrender.

My interpretation of this technological limit for Apollo effectiveness is that it is an example of the inverse R squared law for signal strength which the FTL transmission must obey. Just the same as only the biggest planetary defense arrays can detect a hyper-transition that is sufficiently far away; the detector that can be put into the Mark 23E has a limit beyond which the signal is too weak, unless it receives a boost from something like a Hermes buoy (the mis-attibution to Mycroft confused me).

PS. fixed to quote structure.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
The Hermes buoy was used for communication, not for missile control.

True, we don't know if that 9 missiles would have hit anything if they wanted to and if the defences were up, but they were in sufficient control to convince Tourville that he had better give up and surrender.

Joe Buckley's site is back up.

David Weber wrote: http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/en ... gton/159/0

The ranges at which Honor fired in the Battle of Manticore -- up to eight light-minutes against Tourville and 75,000,000 km against Chin -- were both outside the maximum reception range Haven's intelligence types had assumed the control birds would possess. In fact, in Tourville's case, the range was outside Apollo's effective reception range; Honor used a Hermes buoy, with its much greater reception range, and the inner-system FTL recon platforms, to coordinate the "demonstration attack" on Second Fleet. In many respects, that attack was essentially a bluff, although I deliberately didn't say so in the book, since at the moment I'm rather looking forward to allowing the reader to fully appreciate Tourville's reaction when he finds out that it was in a later scene. Honor didn't begin to have the available bandwidth to coordinate full-scale missile attacks at that range, so she deliberately restricted her "demonstration" to a number of missiles she did have the bandwidth to control through her jury rigged telemetry set up.

kzt wrote:

David Weber Ch2 MoH wrote:"Yes." He leaned forward, propping his forearms on his thighs, and his eyes were very sharp. "The other 'bluff' I've been wondering about is whether or not you really could have done it from that range?"

Honor swung her chair from side to side in a small, thoughtful arc while she considered his question. Theoretically, what he was asking edged into territory covered by the Official Secrets Act. On the other hand, it wasn't as if he was going to be e-mailing the information to the Octagon. Besides . . . .

"No," she said after no more than two or three heartbeats.

"I couldn't have. Not from that range."

"Ah." He sat back once more, his crooked smile going even more crooked. Then he inhaled deeply. "Part of me really hated to hear that," he told her. "Nobody likes finding out he was tricked into surrendering."

There are multiple reasons why she might not have been able to destroy the remnants of Second Fleet from 8 light-minutes away and the Apollo fire control is just one of them. We calculated she had about 60% of her ammo load left and Tourville had 100 SD(P)s, though many of them pretty battered -- let's call it 75 SD(P)-equivalents. The degraded fire control over such a long distance means they'd need more missiles per target, which could mean she might not have had enough, especially if Second Fleet instead of closing the distance tried to keep it open.

Or worse: tried to go for Manticore. Tourville could arrive there before Honor managed to whittle his forces sufficiently for the forts and fixed defences (which we agreed Manticore didn't like so didn't have a lot of) were able to deal with him.

But let's settle on "shooting from one AU away is a bad idea". At least against RHN forces; who knows how it will fare against other forces, especially after more experience comes in. This was, after all, the first and only action from such a distance at the time.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:There are multiple reasons why she might not have been able to destroy the remnants of Second Fleet from 8 light-minutes away and the Apollo fire control is just one of them. We calculated she had about 60% of her ammo load left and Tourville had 100 SD(P)s, though many of them pretty battered -- let's call it 75 SD(P)-equivalents. The degraded fire control over such a long distance means they'd need more missiles per target, which could mean she might not have had enough, especially if Second Fleet instead of closing the distance tried to keep it open.

Or worse: tried to go for Manticore. Tourville could arrive there before Honor managed to whittle his forces sufficiently for the forts and fixed defences (which we agreed Manticore didn't like so didn't have a lot of) were able to deal with him.

But let's settle on "shooting from one AU away is a bad idea". At least against RHN forces; who knows how it will fare against other forces, especially after more experience comes in. This was, after all, the first and only action from such a distance at the time.

Lets say he goes for Manticore: I do not think Honor's fleet has to shoot itself dry before he gets there, harassing fire would be sufficient until it get into better range to use Apollo. The reason is that, for me, the RHN cannot claim to be in control of the orbitals if they are still contesting with the RMN. So the RHN either has to slow down as it nears Manticore allowing Honor's fleet to get into a better distance that puts the advantage with Apollo or take passing shots as it heads for the hyper limit losing wounded ships as it goes, without Honor's fleet ever needing to get into a range where it can be reliably hit.

tlb wrote:Lets say he goes for Manticore: I do not think Honor's fleet has to shoot itself dry before he gets there, harassing fire would be sufficient until it get into better range to use Apollo. The reason is that, for me, the RHN cannot claim to be in control of the orbitals if they are still contesting with the RMN. So the RHN either has to slow down as it nears Manticore allowing Honor's fleet to get into a better distance that puts the advantage with Apollo or take passing shots as it heads for the hyper limit losing wounded ships as it goes, without Honor's fleet ever needing to get into a range where it can be reliably hit.

Problem is that while he needs to control the orbitals to force the Queen to surrender, he doesn't need to in order to destroy Hephaestus and all the partially complete SD(P)s and CLACs being built there and in dispersed yards near Manticore.

Given that Haven was already outbuilding Manticore I'm not sure Apollo is enough of an edge for Manticore to survive losing Home Fleet, much of 3rd fleet, and all the orbital infrastructure near Manticore.

So if Honor simply restricts herself to harassing fire then the battered 2nd Fleet can probably take the orbital defenses and then trash every bit of orbital infrastructure near Manticore. In many ways that's a worse body blow than Oyster Bay is because, while it only gets 1 set of yards, Manticore had far less of an Apollo missile stockpile and it kills all the partially complete modern warships that Oyster Bay was too late to catch. The only good part is that it's less of a surprise so many workers should be able to evacuate before the station and infrastructure is destroyed.

Jonathan_S wrote:[ The only good part is that it's less of a surprise so many workers should be able to evacuate before the station and infrastructure is destroyed.

Sure they could. But they wouldn’t. 2nd fleet was heading straight for Sphinx and noby said, “hey, what might happen here? Is there anything we should do right now?” No, total deer in the headlights time at RMN high command.

tlb wrote:Lets say he goes for Manticore: I do not think Honor's fleet has to shoot itself dry before he gets there, harassing fire would be sufficient until it get into better range to use Apollo. The reason is that, for me, the RHN cannot claim to be in control of the orbitals if they are still contesting with the RMN. So the RHN either has to slow down as it nears Manticore allowing Honor's fleet to get into a better distance that puts the advantage with Apollo or take passing shots as it heads for the hyper limit losing wounded ships as it goes, without Honor's fleet ever needing to get into a range where it can be reliably hit.

Did she have enough of an acceleration advantage to close that quickly? A Sovereign of Space can pull 529 gravities and an Invictus 562. We don't know what vector Tourville would need to adopt to go from where he was to Manticore, how far he was, what his base velocity was, or what his max acceleration with damaged units would be (though he had already ditched the most damaged ones), which makes this calculation very hard.

I'm going to adopt numbers out of thin air: let's say Second Fleet is 100 million km from Manticore and can only sustain 450 gravities of acceleration. That means it needs 160 minutes of flight to reach Manticore, with a turn-over at 80 minutes (let's ignore any base velocity). In 160 minutes, going flat out and without decelerating, Eighth Fleet can get up to 52956 km/s and travel 254 million km. We know Eighth Fleet is at roughly 150 million km, but we don't know what angle 8th, 2nd and Manticore form. But it doesn't matter, because in the worst case they'd be in a straight line and that would only add up to 250 million km. In this scenario, Honor can beat Tourville to Manticore, which means she has him under powered envelope for some time (calculating how long and the actual powered range given the ships' base velocities is too complex for now).

If Second Fleet could pull it max accel, the flight time would be 146 minutes, during which Eighth can cover 212.6 million km. Or, that is to say, be at 47.4 million km of Second as it was trying to control the Manticore orbitals, with the range decreasing very quickly.

Conclusion: Manticore would need to be much closer for him to beat Honor there with enough time to spare, which isn't likely, as he had been shaping a course for Sphinx, not Manticore, and the planets are pretty far from each other for most of the year.

Going for Sphinx would take him roughly in the direction of Eighth Fleet, so it's no salvation either.

If he accepted a stern chase to the hyper limit, which is around 40 light-minutes away (G0 star's is 22 light-minutes in radius), he could reach it in 4.6 hours @ 529 gravities, 4.75 h at 500 G, and 5 h at 450 G. Either case he's at less than 0.3c, so he doesn't need to decelerate to translate out. Eight fleet can cover 49.6 light-minutes in 5 hours, 45 light-minutes at 4.75 hours, and 42.5 in 4.6 hours. But it starts 8 light-minutes behind. So if Tourville can pull his max accel, Honor is still at least 5.5 light-minutes (99 million km) away and I would say that's a good chance at escaping. But at 500 gravities, Honor is still 3 light-minutes (54 million km) away, which isn't very good chance of escaping.

They don’t need to turn over if they are just going to do a drive-by smash everything. Given that the fixed defenses will probably chew them up I’d bet on just a drive-by. If they decided to do that. Logically you need to take out both Sphinx and Manticore to have a drastic effect on production. They probably don’t have enough combat power to do both.

But we don’t know. The platform non-evacuation tells me the entire high command is in a total ‘Stalin at the start of Barbarossa’ class meltdown. They might not engage at all with the pods to avoid giving the PRH an excuse to shoot back with MDMs.