ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Indeed, but that changes little. The fact is that only McKeon's squadron was firing Apollo because it was the only squadron that had them. There were no more Apollo pods available, whether the ships that could fire them were freighters, Keyhole-less Medusas, or Keyhole II-equipped Invictus. So replacing the superdreadnoughts with freighters would just have caused the platforms to die sooner. And we can't be talking about Apollo because if the defenders had had that, the tactics would have been different in the first place.
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Actually, McKeon had Honor's reloads with him, so he could have had the ammo ships transit with him and Kusak's fleet to Manticore. There, they could have grabbed apollo and non-apollo pods from the ammo carriers, other ammo carriers at the terminus, and the terminus defenses and carried them externally into battle. We've already determined that non Apollo ships can carry apollo pods for apollo ships (Spear Carriers), so dozens of Kusak's ships could have helped carry the Apollo loads. Each of Mckeon's ships have enough bandwidth to fire thousands of missiles in a single salvo (~6500 iirc), and each Harrington/Medusa can carry >400 pods externally, so Mckeon could easily have sent salvos of 20,000+ Apollo munitions at selected targets with Chin, while Kusak alpha striked Tourville over and over (which Tourville could not respond back with.)
This is why Kusak fought dumb, she didn't use any of the Manties 2nd war advantages - it's as if the last tactics update she read was from 1912pd.