ThinksMarkedly wrote:Remember that Terekhov dealt with Crandall's 70 SDs with a single squadron of heavy cruisers. Adm. Gold Peak didn't even have to come out of stealth with her battlecruisers.
Those were Apollo missiles, but they weren't the system defence type. So the RMN could have defeated Tsang with a squadron of cruisers (suitably provisioned by colliers) and a mere two waves of Mk23, and defeated Filareta with just the fixed defences in Sphinx firing the Mk42s.
Home Fleet wouldn't have been needed; Honor and Theisman could have been elsewhere chatting.
I've already suggested how data from the Battle of Spindle should let the RMN improve their targeting effectiveness against SLN SDs after a bit of post-battle analysis.
More precisely, Terekhov's cruisers used the Apollo loadout of approximately 1.2 Invictus to target 24 SDs in one salvo, 500 missiles per target. All 24 were somewhere between unservicable hulks and completely destroyed after that salvo. They "wasted" one more such salvo as a demonstration and had a third ready to fire.
This shows that the podload of less than
four Invictus is sufficient to render ineffective seventy-five SDs. That's "only" a ratio of 1:20. 1:40 is easily achievable by assigning 250 missiles per target rather than 500.
That may not destroy as many SDs outright, but those SDs are going to be in no condition to do anything after that economised pounding.
cthia wrote:I don't know guys, didn't it come out of text that the only missiles available were those in magazines? I took that at face value. Partly because it was in the text, iinm, partly because I think it was the author's intent to dial up the drama, and partly because the MA designed OB to severely handicap the RMN. I don't think they would have made essentially the same mistake the Japanese made of leaving the oil fields intact at Pearl. They seemed to have pretty good Intel.
It is almost a dramatic myth. The MA's designs required for Haven to continue attacking Manticore at the same time the SLN shows up. The RMN was only ever going to be short of missiles if Rajampet and - more importantly! - Theisman kept throwing hundreds of SDs into their system. I think they badly misread Theisman/Pritchart(who by this point had realised Giancola had doctored the diplomatic correspondence which led to Haven restarting the war), among other misjudgements.
The MA hoped for the "python lump" to be destroyed before it left the Manticoran shipyards. No luck there; those would have been fully loaded with ammo, as well as any fleet train attached to them.
The MA also did not attack Trevor's Star, which had some seed maintenance facilities capable of being expanded and converted into producing at least thousands of Apollo control birds as well as the pods required to repackage their currently existing stockpiles of MK23s.
It's simple. Albrecht panicked after he heard about Apollo's unveiling at Lovat because he realised that it had vastly increased the RMN SD(P)'s kill ratio, especially against SLN SDs, to the extent that the League's colossal battle wall suddenly meant nothing. He then attempted to create a window of opportunity for Manticore to be defeated, to avoid a serious delay to the Alignment's plans. It was a dubious proposition at best, since Manticore was already sitting in the Haven system with an armed fleet and negotiating peace when the spiders did their party trick.
The situation the SLN had gotten themselves into is hard to compare, but it'd be as if the British Navy had ignored the ironclad-battleship-dreadnought evolution and then sortied for the Battle of Jutland with 500 cannon-armed wooden ships against the actual High Seas Fleet reinforced by the American, French and Russian WW1 navies.
