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TEIF errors?

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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by tlb   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:59 am

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jaydub69 wrote:When the hastas were detected in that first attack, they had been coasting ballistically for some time, no impeller to detect.

The GA themselves thought that alignment stealth was a little better than their own after observing the alignment's drones, missile pods, and the hasta attack. It was a revelation to Honor.

As to the sneak attack at the end, it was stated that the best munitions had been used up and what was left was regular cataphracts. It's also been implied that GA SDs can take 200-400 hits to destroy.

My point about the final battle being rushed was not the actual battle but the writing of said battle being rushed. For example, if that final suicide launch had been say- 110,000 missiles with 10,000 getting through to attack range. 10,000 missiles taking out 22 capital ships and damaging others seems more reasonable based on earlier battles we've seen.

It has been almost two months since I read the book and I have been grasping at straws; but I have rechecked the book for the following.

Concerning the final post surrender launched missiles to stab from "Hell's Heart"; the book says they were upgraded Cataphacts and were only less capable in the sense that they were armed with laser-heads, not grasers. They could not have been "leftover" missiles, because this entire shot had to be set up before the battle ever started.

Still, with a 150 second flight time it is amazing that even 1000 missiles survived to attack.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by jaydub69   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 4:43 pm

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tlb wrote:
jaydub69 wrote:When the hastas were detected in that first attack, they had been coasting ballistically for some time, no impeller to detect.

The GA themselves thought that alignment stealth was a little better than their own after observing the alignment's drones, missile pods, and the hasta attack. It was a revelation to Honor.

As to the sneak attack at the end, it was stated that the best munitions had been used up and what was left was regular cataphracts. It's also been implied that GA SDs can take 200-400 hits to destroy.

My point about the final battle being rushed was not the actual battle but the writing of said battle being rushed. For example, if that final suicide launch had been say- 110,000 missiles with 10,000 getting through to attack range. 10,000 missiles taking out 22 capital ships and damaging others seems more reasonable based on earlier battles we've seen.

It has been almost two months since I read the book and I have been grasping at straws; but I have rechecked the book for the following.

Concerning the final post surrender launched missiles to stab from "Hell's Heart"; the book says they were upgraded Cataphacts and were only less capable in the sense that they were armed with laser-heads, not grasers. They could not have been "leftover" missiles, because this entire shot had to be set up before the battle ever started.

Still, with a 150 second flight time it is amazing that even 1000 missiles survived to attack.


True, they may have been more capable missiles but launching 11000 against the most powerful and experienced fleet in existence they take out 22 ships of the line with the <1000 surviving warheads?

At hypatia, the sollies fired 120000 cataphracts with the same time of flight at a single nike and 3 heavy cruisers. The nike survived that strike.

11 times as many missiles against at least a couple of orders of magnitude less defences to stop them and there was a surviving ship.....
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by tlb   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 5:05 pm

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You are right, absent a statement from RFC there is no good explanation that we can supply.

Personally, I find all the numbers that get thrown around in a missile engagement to be mind-numbing and I just ignore them to get to the result.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by jaydub69   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 5:29 pm

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I think it boils down to a failure of proofreading. These issues that I brought up at the beginning of the post were in the e-arc and I was surprised to find them unchanged in the final product. To me, the numbers just don't work, misplaced decimal points?

If the "Francis crick" station had been 480 million tons instead of 48 million for example, then a population of 1 million and surviving for days against repeated apollo attacks feels more right to me.

I wouldn't expect anything to even reach attack range with 11000 missiles against 200+ SDs + screen + loreleis + lacs at full alert and 2 1/2 minutes to deal with them. Even if it had been 110000 missiles I don't see the alignment having nearly as much success in the attack as they had but I could at least run with it.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 6:36 pm

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jaydub69 wrote:
At hypatia, the sollies fired 120000 cataphracts with the same time of flight at a single nike and 3 heavy cruisers. The nike survived that strike.

11 times as many missiles against at least a couple of orders of magnitude less defences to stop them and there was a surviving ship.....

Survived is ...generous... HMS Phantom was "a shattered wreck" and apparently didn't have a functional wedge, nor a single functional point defense, to even try to stave of the war crime of the follow-up salvo sent against her.

She was only is marginally better condition than the half a CA, in a "ship-fragment’s splintered state", that was all that was left of HMS Cinqueda.

All 4 ships could fairly have been said to be destroyed by that first salvo; even if not with quite all hands lost. (And I don't have the next of TIEF handy to check what, if any, survivors there were from the murdered capital ships)

I think the key differences were that RMN formation at Hypatia was expecting the strike and had all their defenses ready and a solid ECM/decoy plan in place, that the SLN probably didn't have Cataphracts quite as updated as at Galton, that the SLN programmed them badly as they were far less familiar with modern missile combat, and that most of the Cataphracts the did get through were wasted in ludicrous amounts of overkill against the 4 targets. Enough broke through, despite everything, to probably have killed many times that.

Still it's amazing what soft defenses, ECM, jamming, and decoys can do when well prepared and executed - and uses against an enemy with no clue of your actual capabilities and doctrine for its use. The SLN forces never had a particularly good lock on Task Group 110, which were under stealth, and already has some of Manticore's super-effective Lorelei decoys pretending to be extra ships even before the SLN detected the force. So some of that launch started out aimed at fake ships. Then, while not specifically mentioned in the text, I'd assume they had their normal ECM and close by decoys to further confuse missiles on the exact location of the ship. But prior to that, once the Cataphracts were too close for updates from the SLN forces, thanks to light-speed lag, the Manties managed to drop an entire salvo of Dazzlers in their face and in the confusion bring up the rest of the Lorelie decoys. So you had Cataphracts that never had much fire control help (only enough control links, across the entire SLN force, for 4000 of the 120,000 missiles) then totally on their own and facing several times more fake targets than real ones.

So huge portions of that blind-fire launch simply never even picked out a real target for their laserhead. We're simply not told how many warheads actually engaged the 4 real targets -- but however much it was it was still enough for vast overkill. Not quite enough to vaporize all 4 targets - only 2.5 out of 4. But that just means that all those stilettos gutting the ships didn't manage to rupture the fusion bottles on all of them -- short of a fusion bottle blowing the ship apart its very hard to vaporize or completely break apart a warship with laserheads. They punch deep, but they're not literally slicing the ship apart.

What I can't remember from TIEF, is whether or not that posthumous surprise launch had any fire control support, or if it was totally blind-fired like the one at Hypatia. Any fire control support would have made it massively more effective.

Still, the only reason that even 120,000 blind fired Cataphracts at Hypatia didn't kill more targets is because there weren't more targets to kill. Every RMN ships within range was obliterated or utterly crippled by that salvo.

At Galton Honors ships weren't hiding, they didn't have decoys out before the missile launch, they weren't expecting a launch from a surrendered system (probably didn't even have their Keyholes out). Still, if only 11,000 were launched you'd expect RMN missile defenses to stop more than just 91% of them. And I agree that a thousand actual hits seems a bit light to outright kill 22 capital ships -- though again I don't have the text to break down how many were of each type; CLACs being far easier to kill than SD(P)s.
At Solon I think Imperators was still around (if heavily damaged) after taking around 30-40 hits. She took "dozens of hits" in the first salvo; "energy mounts and laser clusters were wiped out, and communication and fire control emitters, radar and gravitic arrays shattered" -- losing both her Keyholes, and one of them being the freak hit up the podbay that knocked out all her pods. The Havenite CIC called it "major damage" based on what their sensors saw. Yet her acceleration was unimpaired and she retained at least reasonable amounts of her onboard point defenses and fire control (even if she lacked the ability to roll pods for that fire control to control). Then in the 2nd salvo an additional 31 got through, split between Imperator and Intolerant. It's not clear exactly how many additional hits Intolerant took (Imperator took at least 6; but I doubt Intolerant took the other 25; some likely missed or got stopped after the last missile count in the book). Still she wasn't dead yet (though very much in the Monty Python sense of that phrase) having lost "her entire starboard sidewall aft of midships" and having "at least three core hull breaches, and one fusion plant's off-line. Her shipboard fire control and point defense are seriously compromised" But she still had per port sidewall, and her acceleration.
It was the later salvo, from the planetary defense pods, that ludicrously overkilled the already badly damaged SD(P) with "literally hundreds of" warheads hitting her.

But that doesn't mean you need hundreds of warheads to kill an SD(P) and more that someone being killed by a machine gun firing off its entire 250 round belt means you need over a hundred bullet hits to kill a person.

Still, Imperator probably survived 30-60 hits, spread across those first 2 waves, and had they been able to avoid the planetary pods would have been able to limp back to the yards and, eventually, get repaired and returned to service. So yeah, while an SD(P) might be unlucky and die to 45 hits I wouldn't count on an average of 45 to be sure of killing one consistently. (Crippling it and sending it back to the yards; damned straight. But outright killing it 22 times in a row; maybe not so much)
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by jaydub69   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:21 pm

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I agree with basically most of your post except...

It was stated that the GF fleet was headed into the system fully alert, with a shell of drones and a thousand lacs surrounding them. When the launch happened, they were ready and the lorelei decoys were "fully spun up". They had already been burned by Galton's deception once before so if there was ever a time to be on their toes this was it, and they clearly wsre.

Also, I don't think there was any breakdown on survivors, just lost ships. I believe it was 11 SDs, the others being CLACS and battlecruisers.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by jaydub69   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 8:24 pm

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Another proofreading example: when we are first introduced to the Francis Crick it's referred to as Galton's lagest habitat, then two paragraphs later it is stated that there were other larger habitats in Galton.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 9:44 pm

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jaydub69 wrote:The primary fortress at galton-48 million tons of heavily armored and armed mass so equivalent to about 5-6 SDs, yet over a million Inhabitants?


I don't see that as a problem. You just need to increase the internal volume to add more living space. Armour is proportional to surface area, not volume, so increasing the internal volume will cause a mass increase following the square-cube law. Therefore, 48 million tonnes of armour are equivalent to 6 eight-million tonne SDs of armour... but equivalent to 14.7 SDs worth of internal volume. If you also remove the hypergenerators and the volume dedicated to bunkerage, and food storage, you probably cram even more people inside. So it wouldn't be surprising to find that 48 million tonnes is equivalent to 30-60 SDs worth of people.

All of this is assuming the armour proportion was kept with the increase in linear dimensions, which doesn't need to be followed. And I need to check now if this was referring to one of the space stations or the habitats. Habitats will also have far less armour per inhabitant, as a rule.

So I don't think this is specifically a problem. The other ones, though...

The first Hasta attack against the GF- surely the MA would be aware of the particle bow shock at high c reducing their stealth and would therefore approach less speedily so as to remain undetected as long as possible. Also, would they not made that first attack as large and decisive as possible? And those graser armed Hastas didn't seem very effective.


As others have said, the tactic of not using your best Sunday punch right at the outset wasn't very smart. It gave the game away for pitiful return. Maybe Adebayo was hoping Honor would come closer and therefore increase the Hasta/missiles' reliability, but that didn't happen. Maybe Adebayo was just inexperienced and was counting on success, which is not something an experienced military commander would do. It was, after all, her first (and last) engagement.

As for whether to go slower, as others have said, the problem is that it increases the time between possible detection and attack. Even if it's insufficient for the SDs to hyper out, it gives the defenders more time to spin up defences, launch CMs and decoys. The Dazzlers and Dragon's Teeth can be (and have been) used in defensive mode too. If nothing else, Honor had so many missiles she could have launched a barricade.

In addition to the increase in time, the attack run's velocity would be lower, thus making each individual missile easier to intercept.

The "after surrender" attack- less than 1000 surviving standard cataphracts took out 22 capital ships, half of them SDs? Those missiles were orders of magnitude better than the Graser heads, or any other missile.

Honor mentioning the "graser armed missiles or drones" used at Manticore seems like an attempt by the author to recon GA knowledge of the spider drive out of that attack.


This one I have to paper over and ignore. There are just too many things wrong.

First, there's no way that 11,000 missiles would take out 22 alert ships. Even if they had been improved to pre-alliance RHN levels, 11,000 missiles didn't take two SDs at Solon. Sure, those missiles had a much longer flight time so Eighth Fleet did track them for far longer and prepared targetting solutions, but this time Honor had 125x more ships. It simply doesn't compute.

The other thing that doesn't compute is the flight time. The text says it took them 150 seconds, which is simply not possible, because Honor had parked over a light-minute away. To do that, they'd have had to accelerate at average of 81521 gravities, which are way beyond the specs of the Cataphracts. Or that of any missile's single stage, that we know of. Each stage can reach and surpass that if used in full power, but they burn out in 60 seconds. Therefore, a Mk23 could have this performance; a Cataphract can't. Earlier in the book, we're presented with some performance numbers (which also have problems, see "Cataphract performance numbers" thread), but it's clear that while they have a light-minute range, they need both stages to do that and therefore need 225 seconds.

Those extra 75 seconds make a great deal of difference for the defenders. Who were, as others have noted too and I mentioned above, already alert.

Third, there's the control aspect. Since the space stations were already space dust by this point, there wasn't any. Or maybe there was... those 60 SDs that sat the battle out could have been conceivably used for this exact thing. The problem for Alamo is that those are legitimate military targets (they had been all along), so retaliating against them wouldn't accomplish much in the MAlign's plans. Or maybe the fire control came from the habitats themselves? That would make them legitimate military targets, but explaining that to an audience already prejudiced against the RMN and GA in general after the Mesan Atrocity could be a hard sell.

All of this didn't have to happen for the story line. If it had been 2.2 ships instead of 22, the situation would have been the same: Honor could have legitimately ordered return fire on what had now been revealed to be military target, and she would have been as tempted to do that whether one of her people had died or 30,000 had. I think the authors wanted to make us feel sorry for Honor and see her internal struggle, but I don't think they needed to go that high on number of ships.

No use by Galton of "block ships" or wedge drones for shielding, even though they had the industry to build probably tens of thousands?


They could have and in this aspect I think it's irrelevant. They might have used block ships, but they were fighting against wave after wave of the Galaxy's best missiles with FTL control. The block ships wouldn't have done much more than delay the inevitable. In fact, that might have been exactly what happened and why it took Honor one week to methodically demolish the defences.

To me, the whole Galton battle was a bit too glossed over. For an event that is supposed to be the end of the alignment. It seemed like an afterthought and rushed.

Anyways, that's my 2 cents for now.


I agree. Plus... the fact that this came right out of nowhere. David usually gives good hints at things to come, even if we can't tell that they are there the moment we first read them. He introduced Theisman all the way back in HotQ. He distracted us with Esther McQueen so we wouldn't see the CPS being toppled. And do note how Ruth working on the captured MAN officer (Cmdr. Jessica Miliken) is probably foreshadowing something to happen in the future. Ditto for the Hole in the Wall raid, and maybe something was recovered out of the Mannerheim/Warner bridge warehouses owned by Jessyk. Not to mention that we may still hear about sensor readings of the spider drive in both the Yawata and Beowulf strikes.

And while it doesn't strictly contradict anything we've been told, this is very unexpected and very uncharacteristic of David. So I have to wonder what he is going at with this. It sounds like he's preparing for a timeline jump, but even if he is, it's not likely to be so long as had been originally intended. Ruth having stepped into the shoes meant for Katherine is one such evidence.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 9:44 pm

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jaydub69 wrote:Another proofreading example: when we are first introduced to the Francis Crick it's referred to as Galton's lagest habitat, then two paragraphs later it is stated that there were other larger habitats in Galton.


Wasn't that largest station vs habitat? The two categories don't have to be the same.
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Re: TEIF errors?
Post by jaydub69   » Sun Dec 05, 2021 10:28 pm

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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
jaydub69 wrote:Another proofreading example: when we are first introduced to the Francis Crick it's referred to as Galton's lagest habitat, then two paragraphs later it is stated that there were other larger habitats in Galton.


Wasn't that largest station vs habitat? The two categories don't have to be the same.


"Habitat" was specifically used in this case. I'm sure that it's just an oversight, but that's my point.
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