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.