Honorverse Top Ten Tacticians, Strategists

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Question. Could Chin have had her fleet go ahead and spin up their hypergenerators and all, in preparation to hyper out, and cancelled it if Honor's salvo was a bluff? Say, when the salvo's drives came back online, they could hyper out then. Would her fleet have had time? What are any downsides? Being prepared to hyper out doesn't hinder missile defense in any way does it?

No, that's not how we're told hypergenerators work. They have three states only: cold, ready, hypering. To go from cold to ready takes a lot of time (20 to 30 minutes), so she probably had her generators at the ready state. From there, they can be activated immediately to hyper her fleet out, but the act of transitioning is proportional to the mass or volume of the ship. A 9-million tonne SD(P) takes 3.5 minutes from the moment you press the button in the ready generator to actually transitioning to alpha. And once you do transition, the generators have completely discharged and have to build up again from cold to ready to do it again, be it either going up in the bands (alpha to beta) or going down (alpha to n-space).

She did have her fleet in ready state, which is why some capital ships escaped at all, including hers. It took longer than the 3.5 minutes because it took time for her tac team to notify her, time for her to realise what that meant, and time for the order to propagate to the fleet who wasn't expecting that order to come. So the only thing that she could have changed was to warn her fleet to be ready for it at a moment's notice... but that implies that she had her staff tac team were anticipating the situation, which wasn't the case. If they had been, they wouldn't have missed the launch for what it was and her order would have been given probably soon enough to get to all ships, even the most inattentive ones.

Your actually slightly underestimating at 3.5 minutes for a 9 million ton SD. RFC said "an 8,000,000-ton superdreadnought requires 4 minutes to go from Stand-By to actual translation"

However; we're also told you can cancel a hyper translation during those minutes of minimum cycle time -- between when you hit the button and when you actually translate out. (But doing so apparently discharges things and do it'd be quite a while before you can try again).

So, in theory, if she's unsure whether it's a bluff she could buy time and order her SDs to "press the button" at, say, 4.5 minutes till impact (with her lighter ships doing the same at proportionately shorter times; so the fleet is scheduled to make a simultaneous hyper translation 30 seconds before impact). Then that gives her about, say, 3 more minutes to make up her mind (leaving 90 seconds disseminate any cancel order); and if she decides that it actually was a bluff she'd send that order and keep her fleet in the fight. (And if she decides it isn't a bluff then her fleet leaves, as ordered, before the laserheads start tearing it apart)

I suppose the question is how much can the target -ship or fleet- maneuver in the ballistic phase of a MDM launch and still accomplish what they need do. If you are heading in X direction at Y speed with Z acceleration what changes can you (or do you want to) make to accomplish two things. 1st is make it more difficult for the incoming missiles to engage you and 2nd bring your opponent under fire. Sure, you would like to try and get out of the engagement envelope of the incoming strike (partially at least) and possibly open the range to give your CM more opportunity to take out missiles. But how do you change your vectors and even if your 100% successful in dodging the strike, will you still end up in a window of opportunity to engage your target or accomplish something else you have been tasked with.
We usually see ships maneuvering either to bring their own weapons into engagement rage of an opponent or to get out of the target window -based on what you think you know of the other side's weapons plus their speed, acceleration and where they are heading- or if they are bending their flight to get closer or further away from you.

If you job is to inflict as much damage and destruction on the other side, you may (and this happens all the time in so many of the battles we see) just have to drive into whatever the volume of fire is going to be and hope your defenses are better and your weapons can overcome the other side's defenses.
One ongoing problem is that even the "normal" missiles have some ability to require some target so most of the time you need to maintain your best defensive formation and move it as a body to provide the best overlap of CM and energy weapon anti-missile defense along with rolling ships to interpose the wedge as best possible. If you end up opening up a flank of your formation (lower the overlapping anti-missile fire and ECM) you can take more damage and attrition of your launchers and countermeasures (and ships destroyed or mission killed) is going to hurt you.
And perhaps you wait too long to perceive what is actualy going on and then get hammered.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

cthia wrote:Question. Could Chin have had her fleet go ahead and spin up their hypergenerators and all, in preparation to hyper out, and cancelled it if Honor's salvo was a bluff? Say, when the salvo's drives came back online, they could hyper out then. Would her fleet have had time? What are any downsides? Being prepared to hyper out doesn't hinder missile defense in any way does it?

No, that's not how we're told hypergenerators work. They have three states only: cold, ready, hypering. To go from cold to ready takes a lot of time (20 to 30 minutes), so she probably had her generators at the ready state. From there, they can be activated immediately to hyper her fleet out, but the act of transitioning is proportional to the mass or volume of the ship. A 9-million tonne SD(P) takes 3.5 minutes from the moment you press the button in the ready generator to actually transitioning to alpha. And once you do transition, the generators have completely discharged and have to build up again from cold to ready to do it again, be it either going up in the bands (alpha to beta) or going down (alpha to n-space).

She did have her fleet in ready state, which is why some capital ships escaped at all, including hers. It took longer than the 3.5 minutes because it took time for her tac team to notify her, time for her to realise what that meant, and time for the order to propagate to the fleet who wasn't expecting that order to come. So the only thing that she could have changed was to warn her fleet to be ready for it at a moment's notice... but that implies that she had her staff tac team were anticipating the situation, which wasn't the case. If they had been, they wouldn't have missed the launch for what it was and her order would have been given probably soon enough to get to all ships, even the most inattentive ones.

Jonathan_S wrote:Your actually slightly underestimating at 3.5 minutes for a 9 million ton SD. RFC said "an 8,000,000-ton superdreadnought requires 4 minutes to go from Stand-By to actual translation"

However; we're also told you can cancel a hyper translation during those minutes of minimum cycle time -- between when you hit the button and when you actually translate out. (But doing so apparently discharges things and do it'd be quite a while before you can try again).

So, in theory, if she's unsure whether it's a bluff she could buy time and order her SDs to "press the button" at, say, 4.5 minutes till impact (with her lighter ships doing the same at proportionately shorter times; so the fleet is scheduled to make a simultaneous hyper translation 30 seconds before impact). Then that gives her about, say, 3 more minutes to make up her mind (leaving 90 seconds disseminate any cancel order); and if she decides that it actually was a bluff she'd send that order and keep her fleet in the fight. (And if she decides it isn't a bluff then her fleet leaves, as ordered, before the laserheads start tearing it apart)

Ah! So not only was Chin most definitely drinking gin, it wasn't even the good stuff.

About that 4.5 minutes. Would that be after the missile's drives came back up? Or would that be a guestimate of when they would come back up. I ask because I never realized that that much time was left on the drives after they came back online.

It would have to be after the drives spun back up, since the Havenites didn't have true intel on Apollo's range.

Brigade XO wrote:I suppose the question is how much can the target -ship or fleet- maneuver in the ballistic phase of a MDM launch and still accomplish what they need do. If you are heading in X direction at Y speed with Z acceleration what changes can you (or do you want to) make to accomplish two things. 1st is make it more difficult for the incoming missiles to engage you and 2nd bring your opponent under fire. Sure, you would like to try and get out of the engagement envelope of the incoming strike (partially at least) and possibly open the range to give your CM more opportunity to take out missiles. But how do you change your vectors and even if your 100% successful in dodging the strike, will you still end up in a window of opportunity to engage your target or accomplish something else you have been tasked with.
We usually see ships maneuvering either to bring their own weapons into engagement rage of an opponent or to get out of the target window -based on what you think you know of the other side's weapons plus their speed, acceleration and where they are heading- or if they are bending their flight to get closer or further away from you.

If you job is to inflict as much damage and destruction on the other side, you may (and this happens all the time in so many of the battles we see) just have to drive into whatever the volume of fire is going to be and hope your defenses are better and your weapons can overcome the other side's defenses.
One ongoing problem is that even the "normal" missiles have some ability to require some target so most of the time you need to maintain your best defensive formation and move it as a body to provide the best overlap of CM and energy weapon anti-missile defense along with rolling ships to interpose the wedge as best possible. If you end up opening up a flank of your formation (lower the overlapping anti-missile fire and ECM) you can take more damage and attrition of your launchers and countermeasures (and ships destroyed or mission killed) is going to hurt you.
And perhaps you wait too long to perceive what is actualy going on and then get hammered.

Interesting post. I don't understand how the window of opportunity could close as long as you are in range. The ship's orientation can change at any time to open broadsides as long as there is no incoming salvo. No?

At any rate, it is difficult to believe that a missile can retain lock on a target after a long ballistic phase, with sensors that are so myopic, especially without updates from the mothership. Which in the Havenite's case at one point, I don't see how they could take advantage of long ballistic phases with their lack of FTL. Even the SL had ballistic launches without FTL updates. At any rate, even though the drives are shut down the communication relays aren't. Duh.

Jonathan corrected my thinking about one aspect of missile launches. They are targeted for where the fleet should be when the salvo arrives. But if that is so, how are the missiles "locked on?" Much like a quarterback timing the receiver, but the "timed" pass isn't locked on.

Can a warship bring its wedge back up as quickly as a missile if it shut it down?

cthia wrote:Ah! So not only was Chin most definitely drinking gin, it wasn't even the good stuff.

Looks like her staff was drinking it too.

About that 4.5 minutes. Would that be after the missile's drives came back up? Or would that be a guestimate of when they would come back up. I ask because I never realized that that much time was left on the drives after they came back online.

It would have to be after the drives spun back up, since the Havenites didn't have true intel on Apollo's range.

That's from the moment they press the button to translate to hyper to the ship actually finding itself there. When you press that button is up to you.

An MDM has three 3-minute drives. The powered range for such a missile is completely independent of when each stage is fired up: it's always 65.78 million km. To extend that range, you allow the missile to coast ballistically before or after any of the stages. Before the first stage doesn't make sense, since the missile only has the velocity imparted by the launcher, which is minimal. After the last stage doesn't make sense because then it has no wedge to manoeuvre and attack the evading ship, even though it's moving at 0.81c: you want the missile to arrive with some time left in the wedge clock (a couple of seconds). That leaves between first and second, and between second and third gives the minimum time for the same range: the missile covers 29.23 million km and reaches 0.54c, then coasts until it's eaten up the difference between the powered range (65.78) and the actual range.

So this is really easy math for the target too: Chin knew her distance from Honor's ships, so she knew how much space those missiles would need to coast ballistically. Given that and given that the relative velocity at the end of the second stage is known, the time is easy too. That's what I calculated above: for a 73 million km distance, the ballistic phase is 45 seconds, plus however many seconds the missiles want to have in the last stage when they attack.

cthia wrote:At any rate, it is difficult to believe that a missile can retain lock on a target after a long ballistic phase, with sensors that are so myopic, especially without updates from the mothership. Which in the Havenite's case at one point, I don't see how they could take advantage of long ballistic phases with their lack of FTL. Even the SL had ballistic launches without FTL updates. At any rate, even though the drives are shut down the communication relays aren't. Duh.

Jonathan corrected my thinking about one aspect of missile launches. They are targeted for where the fleet should be when the salvo arrives. But if that is so, how are the missiles "locked on?" Much like a quarterback timing the receiver, but the "timed" pass isn't locked on.

There are two problems with the ballistic phase.

The first is the reason why it was necessary: the target is very far away. That means the launching ship had poor resolution on those targets, which means the accuracy is going to be low. That's a bit hard to swallow, since the missile's performance shouldn't degrade: it attacks from the same distance from the target, whether it flew 2 seconds or 600. As you said, the launching ship did no more than to launch them in a narrow cone of probability of where the enemy would be when the missiles arrive. It's the missiles that course-correct during the powered drive to arrive where the targets really are.

The other is that during the ballistic phase, the target ships could move and dodge, thus breaking the target locks. That's also a bit hard to accept, since the angular deflection is minimal, and no different than if the missile had remained powered. In fact, since it has no wedge at this time, it should have an improved view (not that it's necessary).

But we're told this is it and we can't argue. Take it at face value and accept it.

Another factor is that the tac team at the launching ship(s) can send updated ECM and ECCM packages to compensate for whatever the target is doing or has done to past missile waves. We saw that very well during HMS Phantom's launch on the SL at Hypatia. This one does indeed depend on distance because the launching ships need to receive that telemetry, do something, then transmit the updates, all limited by light speed if not using Apollo.

Can a warship bring its wedge back up as quickly as a missile if it shut it down?

I think so, as long as they keep the impellers hot. When we saw ships shutting their wedges down, they can bring them back up quickly enough that no delay was mentioned.

If the impellers go cold, then it's a 30-45 minute restart time. And in that period, they can be crashed again and cause maintenance issues (see how Travis solved the problem of pirates trying to steal the Cascan heavy cruiser CDS Péridot in ACTD).

ThinksMarkedly wrote:An MDM has three 3-minute drives. The powered range for such a missile is completely independent of when each stage is fired up: it's always 65.78 million km. To extend that range, you allow the missile to coast ballistically before or after any of the stages. Before the first stage doesn't make sense, since the missile only has the velocity imparted by the launcher, which is minimal. After the last stage doesn't make sense because then it has no wedge to manoeuvre and attack the evading ship, even though it's moving at 0.81c: you want the missile to arrive with some time left in the wedge clock (a couple of seconds). That leaves between first and second, and between second and third gives the minimum time for the same range: the missile covers 29.23 million km and reaches 0.54c, then coasts until it's eaten up the difference between the powered range (65.78) and the actual range.

And as a matter of practice we've only ever seen MDMs go ballistic between the 2nd and 3rd drives (after 6 minutes of acceleration, and with 3 minutes remaining).

So if you want to "hit the button" 4.5 minutes from laserhead range you'd need to hit it 90 seconds before you expect the 3rd drive to come online.

The good news is that if the missiles bring their drive up late then they'll reach you later and so you'll have hypered out even earlier than just 30 seconds before impact. (And they can't bring their drive up early and still be able to maneuver once reaching you) But the bad news is that should you decide the longer ballistic phase means it's a bluff, and cancel your translation, I believe that would strand you in n-space for at least half an hour. (So if you were wrong about it being a bluff you'll have to weather many salvos before being able to retreat again)

tlb wrote:At the very end of chapter 65 in At All Costs:

"I agree, too," Honor said. "But two things. First, I want to start rolling pods now. Use their onboard tractors to limpet them to the hulls. I want a third of our total pod loadout out there, if we can manage it."

You might compare that to the actions of the noted crackhead, who, in marked change from previous RMN doctrine, didn't start to roll pods until she came under fire from the fleet she'd been in range of for 20 minutes. And then got most of her weapons blowed up along with her ships and herself.

kzt wrote:You might compare that to the actions of the noted crackhead, who, in marked change from previous RMN doctrine, didn't start to roll pods until she came under fire from the fleet she'd been in range of for 20 minutes. And then got most of her weapons blowed up along with her ships and herself.

My only comment to that is someone so noted as Kusak, who shared a fleetbase with Honor (who, let's face it, would have asked Kusak to play OpFor while training up 8th fleet at least once), would have been so far behind the tactical ball is ridiculous. 3rd fleet's actions were purely plot driven. Every armchair admiral knows she should have send spoiling salvos against 2nd fleet, while rolling an alpha strike, which launched at maximum effective range, with layered LAC antimissile shells. Nope, we got 1900pd tactics against 1921pd foes. It was a total setup for failure driven by plot.

Theemile wrote:My only comment to that is someone so noted as Kusak, who shared a fleetbase with Honor (who, let's face it, would have asked Kusak to play OpFor while training up 8th fleet at least once), would have been so far behind the tactical ball is ridiculous. 3rd fleet's actions were purely plot driven. Every armchair admiral knows she should have send spoiling salvos against 2nd fleet, while rolling an alpha strike, which launched at maximum effective range, with layered LAC antimissile shells. Nope, we got 1900pd tactics against 1921pd foes. It was a total setup for failure driven by plot.

Yup. And it was totally silly, as having a huge fleet jump in on top of your fleet is not something you can be expected to account for in your operations or planning. So even if she'd done everything right 3rd fleet was going to get crushed.