cthia wrote:I also predicted that the GA would make a big mistake because they were going in blind. Remember when I was gobsmacked about the notion of a siege? Well, one of the things I said would be lacking is a staging area. An immediate staging area. As follows ...
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We can't assume many things that David chose not to say.
So we don't know they didn't have a staging area nearby.
We do know she had a huge fleet train to have brought 50 million missiles. How may freighters is that? Do you really expect they were just across the alpha wall? No, I expect them to be slightly away from the hyperlimit, to avoid a relief force ambushing them in alpha. Not as far as a second system, but slightly away from the hyperlimit.
As TM mentioned, drones would be sent in to stalk the system. These drones would get deep into enemy territory swinging the long way around trying to avoid detection. Now, when the fleet finally arrives, they have got to "sit like ducks" w/o any accel. Stooging around the hyper limit for lack of a staging area, waiting for the feed from the farthest drones to reach them, and then allow time for the staff to formulate tactics. I stated early on in the thread that that wouldn't be possible in Darius.
Yeah, arriving on the least-time course is another thing I wouldn't have done, after all the discussion in this thread and in the BSDF-to-Navy one about defending Sphinx. The least-time course is the one most likely to be patrolled and it's the one most likely to be targetted by the ready defences. And since this is the navy that has superb stealth, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" so they couldn't say that the Ghost Riders that scouted the system from a light-hour away had definitely picked everything up.
I think they should have taken a page of what they'd see with the same operations if they had scouted the Manticore-A system. And they shouldn't find the Mk40 system defence missile emplacements that can have tens of thousands of missiles crashing in on the least-time course within 12 minutes of arrival, which is shorter than the cycle time for the hypergenerators.
In my mind, that was reckless.
Honor got away with it. She wouldn't on Darius... not because of the torpedoes, which couldn't get up to speed fast enough. No, the issue are the Ninurtas.
Even at Galton they were surprised the GA was stooging. Sitting like ducks. The truth is that at Darius, that first launch would have been an Alpha launch and the GA would have taken huge losses. That was a gigantic mistake Honor made even at the beginning. It didn't bite her on the ass because Galton didn't mount a serious defense, or offense. But then, against an enemy they had trouble seeing, the GA had no choice. Just like I predicted. They didn't dare blindly rush in where fools fear to tread. If that first launch would have been at Darius against the same sitting ducks, the result would have been roasted pheasant.
Right, the "sitting like ducks" is my problem. More below.
On Darius, the ready missiles would fire and I expect the Ninurtas to be true MDMs, so with a sufficient range to catch anyone arriving anywhere near the hyperlimit before they can translate out. So I agree that an alpha launch would make the GF's day really bad.
How bad, we don't know. How many Ninurta does it take to cripple a 250 SD(P) plus CLAC force that translated ready, with CMs and PDLCs spun up and then all the LAC wings launched?
I also predicted that the defense of Darius would include emplacements outside the limit, guessing at probable approach vectors. Honor mused about weapons being found so far out. There would have been a lot more of them at Darius.
Agreed, but again, Ninurta conventional missiles. Remember the perimeter of the hyperlimit is 2.5 billion km. So if each emplacement covers 50 million km, you need 50 emplacements. That's doable and it throws missiles at the uninvited arrivals within 9 minutes of arrival.
Torpedoes wouldn't work. They would be too slow to get anywhere before the fleet moved from the arrival point. They would attack too slow too.
Remember the least-time course moves with the planet. Since you don't know when the enemy will arrive, you can't predict where that least-time course will be. Maintaining position from outside the hyperlimit means being underway, accelerating to keep up with the orbital speed of the planet 10-12 light-minutes further closer to the orbital focus (Kepler's Laws). That means spending fuel and making emissions, both of which can be detected and do require maintenance of.
And, at Darius that shell of drones, part of the life blood of the assault, would have been eaten for lunch. Effectively putting the RMN's eyes out.
I disagree, for two reasons.
First, you have no basis to say that the MAN has better sensors capable of seeing the drones than the Galton Navy did. Honor parked a GR at 80,000 km from their stations and they didn't see it until it started transmitting.
Second, I don't think that's tactically sound. Every weapon firing at a GR is a weapon not firing at a LAC, CL, CA or capital ship. And such an attack heralds the arrival of another wave of attack, so the GF could simply translate out to alpha.
I agree that their presence is a problem to a stealth attack, but attacking the GRs is not easy and not effective.
And, please forget about this blockade business. It ain't so. You can't blockade ships you cannot see. How do the GA know they were stopping invisible ships. Darius had to have a way to ensure that the after action report reached Darius. There was no blockade. You can't interfere with Ghosts.
Agreed, you can't blockade ships you can't see from leaving, but what good is that for the long-term plans?
They can't come back, because their arrival is obvious. They can't evacuate the entire industry. The best they could do is evacuate the party leaders.
Speaking of enormous numbers, you can't possibly pack more luggage than a serious navy has at home. There was no way the RMN could carry more missiles to Nouveau Paris than were in the "Home System." That is only part of what I mean when I said at Galton, they effectively had two rounds in the chambers, if using six-shooters! Compared to what a Home System should have! Compared to what Darius will have. The tactics the GA used at Galton would have gotten them killed in Darius.
I agree with the rational part of your paragraph, but not the analogy. That's misleading.
Honor brought 50 million missiles. To compare that to two bullets is incredibly disingenuous at a minimum. For one thing, she could make huge 100k-missile launches 500 times over.
But yes, the defenders of the system have all of their industry and all of their stock of missiles. So I'd expect that an attack on Darius would face at a minimum 100 million Ninurtas.
The problem for the defenders is whose industry is under attack.
Those stealth torpedoes would have wiped the stooges out with the first Alpha launch.
No, but that's rehashing discussions already had. TEiF brought us no more information that would allow us to decide one way or another here.
Aside from the fact that Honor did adopt the shell formation.
They were doing a piss poor job. The Alignment's defense were eating them for lunch. Like the RMN's countermissile defense usually does. At a dug in Darius, considering that CMs are cheap and plentiful, Honor's launches would be eaten. She can't have brought along more missiles than CMs, in a bonafide heavily fortified system. And again, that fleet train will be derailed at Darius.
Don't argue with the evidence.
At the end of a week, the Galton defensive formation was in taters. Ergo, the missile attacks were effective.
Galton had the best non-spider navy anywhere outside the GA itself. They had 17 SD(P)s, which NO ONE else in the Galaxy aside from their enemies did. Not even the Maya Sector Navy has that many yet. They may not have had the Ninurtas, but there's no reason to think their CMs and PDLCs would have been any worse than what the MAN has at Darius. In fact, they did have pod-launched CMs, an innovation the GA hadn't clued in to yet.
So they had the best conventional defences one could have had. They did catch a lot of the Mk23 before those struck.
And none of that was sufficient. From 180 million km out, Honor consistently and methodically demolished the defenders, one by one, without hitting any of the habitats and probably leaving most of the infrastructure intact too. Honor did not have to escalate to more massive attacks, which would have produced more collateral damage, because she didn't have to.
If, somehow, the defences at Darius were 10x better, which isn't likely, then Honor would have sent salvos 20x bigger and still produced the same effect.
I certainly agree. Actually, I think those ships were only props on a stage of misdirection. No serious navy would have so much production without having produced capital ships. They had to have something there. Or the GA would have asked, "Where are their ships?" They were never meant to put up a real fight.
Not sure what you mean by this paragraph.
The Galton Navy had 67 capital ships, 17 of which were SD(P)s. Not only was that more SD(P)s than anyone else outside the GA, that's also more SDs than anyone else besides the GA again and the SLN. So, "where are their ships?" Right there.
The infrastructure that was visible in Galton was used to build those ships and the weapons that go aboard them. Those are clearly not props.
If you meant that, when scouting Darius, one would see the infrastructure but not the ships and wonder where those ships are, then that's true. But to go from there to "we must man prop ships that they can see" is a stretch. A prop ship that stands to a scrutiny probably costs as much as a real ship to construct. So in order to produce the prop ships, you need to use the industry and thus not produce the real ships. So... no, they aren't producing prop ships.
If they have the technology, they would spin up Loreleis so some signals could be seen. But Loreleis don't last a week.