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Pod layers.

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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Theemile   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 3:50 pm

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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.

<snip>


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.
******
RFC said "refitting a Beowulfan SD to Manticoran standards would be just as difficult as refitting a standard SLN SD to those standards. In other words, it would be cheaper and faster to build new ships."
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 4:26 pm

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Theemile wrote: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.


There probably hadn't been time to load those pods on the ships lining up for transit ASAP. It must have taken 2 hours, but Kuzak's ships already had limpeted pods; they'd have had to jettison those and then add others. I don't suppose this can be done on-the-fly or at a significant quantity. Though whatever little they could do on the last 10 SDs could have made a difference.

The ammo carriers may not have been able to keep up with Third Fleet in hyper or in n-space, unless they were fast military colliers themselves (milspec compensators). I don't expect they were, if they were simply making a delivery from Manticore-A to the Trevor's Star terminus. The hyper problem can be solved by having them transit back to Manticore first, ahead of Third Fleet, and then make the journey back to Manticore-A on their own. But they couldn't keep up with Third Fleet once that started charging after Tourville. They wouldn't close to within 75 million km of Tourville without Third Fleet; however poor RHN accurace would have been at that range, it would be more than enough to shoot defenceless ammo colliers out of the sky.

The only strategy I see working here would be for them to wait for Third Fleet in alpha, with rolled pods inside their wedges. They'd transit with Third Fleet, then release those patterns to Third Fleet, which would charge ahead while those colliers would run in the opposite direction. That would give Kuzak one Apollo-capable Alpha Strike, which would probably finish Second Fleet as a fleet in being. It's unlikely at this point that Fifth Fleet would transit in the first place, having seen Apollo birds taking out Second Fleet without having had a chance to reduce Third's effectiveness. Even if Chin did come, she'd be facing Kuzak's full attention.

But it would have required Kuzak to think of rolling pods before arriving, something we know she didn't, with the ships she already had.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 4:35 pm

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Theemile wrote:
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.

Each Keyhole II is supposed to have the bandwidth to control an entire 6 ship squadron's fire (so they can play game switching which one is broadcasting to make it harder to target).

It's possible, though the books don't say so, that trying to use all of a squadron's Keyhole II's simultaneously might just lead to interference and not to a 12x jump in missiles they can control. But even if that's true McKeon could have split his squadron up with each of his IIRC 4 Keyhole II ships moving to a different part of Kuzak's fleet. That should generate at least a 4x increase in the number of Apollo pods 3rd fleet can control.

Even if you couldn't get more Apollo pods from ammo ships McKeon's squadron died with significant numbers still aboard -- he could have dumped many of those to be tractored to/by 3rd fleet SD(P)s. That would have let him burn through his Apollo missiles much quicker -- minimizing the risk of dying with them unfired and knocking back Haven's fleets all the sooner.
And the early kills will reducing the RMN losses from the conventional MDM engagement. If you don't have enough Apollo pods to win outright then use them up fast, to stack the odds of the rest of the missile dual as far in your favor as you can and as early as you can.

But it seems that Kuzak's ships didn't even pre-roll enough of their own pods for a maximum alpha strike of normal Mk23s. Sure that first longest range shot has the lowest hit percentages; but you've got plenty of ammo and throwing a lot more weight improves your odds due to saturation of the enemy's defenses and even at low hit percentages getting more early gives you an end for the rest of the fight.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 6:37 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:But it seems that Kuzak's ships didn't even pre-roll enough of their own pods for a maximum alpha strike of normal Mk23s. Sure that first longest range shot has the lowest hit percentages; but you've got plenty of ammo and throwing a lot more weight improves your odds due to saturation of the enemy's defenses and even at low hit percentages getting more early gives you an end for the rest of the fight.


They didn't. Which means no flag officer in that fleet thought of it and no CO thought to run the idea up the flag pole either.

Once they arrived, they were limited by the rails and their pod bay doors.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by kzt   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 7:44 pm

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tlb wrote:It should be pointed out that KZT might be saying that Apollo capable freighters would have fared better than either Home Fleet or Kuzak's fleet; which is undeniably true, but that does not make it the best choice when they could build ships like those that Honor commanded. If the freighters were not Apollo capable, then it should be pointed out that he did not mention them having ANY missile defense (aside from the wedge).

I wasn’t even thinking about Apollo.

Apollo would have obliterated 2nd long before they reached effective range in the first salvo. The subsequent salvos would have been used in anti-missile mode.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by tlb   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 7:51 pm

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I recall arguing somewhere in this forum: that if Honor's ships were intended to back up Home Fleet, then she should never have been holding exercises so far away from the wormhole junction. It would have been better to hold those exercises at Manticore's end of the wormhole, somewhere outside of normal commercial traffic lanes.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 9:27 pm

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tlb wrote:I recall arguing somewhere in this forum: that if Honor's ships were intended to back up Home Fleet, then she should never have been holding exercises so far away from the wormhole junction. It would have been better to hold those exercises at Manticore's end of the wormhole, somewhere outside of normal commercial traffic lanes.


That's true, but Eighth's job wasn't only backing up Home Fleet. If that were the case, they should have been part of Home Fleet in the first place, maybe split as a detachment to cover Manticore-B or the terminus, but still Home Fleet.

But they had to hold exercises and they had to hide the effectiveness of Apollo from prying eyes. It's not easy to do that in the MBS, with the huge amount of traffic and freighters dropping out several light-minutes away from the terminus after months long journeys. Any of those could drop off a spy drone to get a better look. And you can't tell if a freighter or courier has better-than-average sensors. An Apollo missile live-fire exercise could probably be seen by almost everyone.

It would probably be far more secure if they exercised in the Manticore-B component.

Anyway, hindsight is 20/20. No one expected that Home Fleet and Third Fleet wouldn't be enough.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by tlb   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 10:40 pm

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tlb wrote:I recall arguing somewhere in this forum: that if Honor's ships were intended to back up Home Fleet, then she should never have been holding exercises so far away from the wormhole junction. It would have been better to hold those exercises at Manticore's end of the wormhole, somewhere outside of normal commercial traffic lanes.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's true, but Eighth's job wasn't only backing up Home Fleet. If that were the case, they should have been part of Home Fleet in the first place, maybe split as a detachment to cover Manticore-B or the terminus, but still Home Fleet.

But they had to hold exercises and they had to hide the effectiveness of Apollo from prying eyes. It's not easy to do that in the MBS, with the huge amount of traffic and freighters dropping out several light-minutes away from the terminus after months long journeys. Any of those could drop off a spy drone to get a better look. And you can't tell if a freighter or courier has better-than-average sensors. An Apollo missile live-fire exercise could probably be seen by almost everyone.

It would probably be far more secure if they exercised in the Manticore-B component.

Anyway, hindsight is 20/20. No one expected that Home Fleet and Third Fleet wouldn't be enough.

I understand that Honor was not just to back up Home Fleet, but her force was the only one that could also make offensive operations.

It was not enough to say that Haven probably would not attack, despite it being shown that Apollo was a game changer. It was the duty of the Admiralty to worry about the worst case, of Haven being so desperate that they would attack before it could be fully implemented. There were danger signs, in the delay of the system defense option; so why weren't regular Apollo pods issued to serve for defense?

There were places in the Manticore system where commercial traffic was not expected. Yes, spy drones might be dropped off, but that is low probability for an ad-hoc exercise. Also ships can be checked for a better than average sensor suite, that was implemented early in the war; ships that had sensors that were too good were banned from wormhole passage.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by Jonathan_S   » Tue Nov 08, 2022 11:40 pm

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tlb wrote:It was not enough to say that Haven probably would not attack, despite it being shown that Apollo was a game changer. It was the duty of the Admiralty to worry about the worst case, of Haven being so desperate that they would attack before it could be fully implemented. There were danger signs, in the delay of the system defense option; so why weren't regular Apollo pods issued to serve for defense?

Presumably because it was brand new system and the production lines hadn't generated massive surpluses of the pods yet. Initial operational use of Apollo until the Battle of Manticore was only a couple of months. And now that I went and looked I didn't realize quite how limited its availability really was!

When they first contemplated sending 8th fleet back out with Apollo, to show that Solon hadn't pulled their teeth they didn't even have enough build for the existing ships in 8th fleet to carry full loads of them -- much less have any reloads!

At All Costs - Ch. 52 wrote:at the moment, only Eighth Fleet is really equipped to handle them, and even they have only partial loadouts on the new pods. We're attempting to get into full production on them as quickly as possible, but we've hit some bottlenecks, and security issues have restricted the number of production facilities we could commit to them


And then after Lovat (which shot away a good chunk of the Apollo birds they'd brought there) when they looked at a follow-up against Jouett there had been enough production refill the fleet's pod bays again; plus a little extra
At All Costs - Ch. 60 wrote:we're getting a handle on the production bottlenecks we've been experiencing. We're going to have a lot more of the Mistletoe-modified drones available, starting in about three weeks, and production of the Apollo pods and control platforms is beginning to accelerate, as well. We've got enough now to completely re-ammunition your command and began establishing a modest stockpile to support your operations.
(This said within hours of Imperators return from Lovat -- so the "re-ammunition" is just to top up whatever they shot off at Lovat plus swap out any remaining non-Apollo pods they might have had to bring on that op. It's not an extra full reload in addition to a full pod-load already aboard.

In the weeks that follow that return Manticore got at least 22 IAN SD(P)s out of their Keyhole II refit, and seemingly scrounged up Apollo loads for them -- that was the Task Force 16 that joined 8th fleet just over a week before the BoM (and more than doubled its force of Keyhole II SD(P)s.

There just weren't ammo dumps full of Apollo missiles to hand out - basically they'd have had maybe 8 weeks worth of production; outside of what was in 8th fleet's pod bays. That's not much, and most of it would have been at Trevor's Star in the ammo ships of 8th Fleet's logistics train.
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Re: Pod layers.
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Wed Nov 09, 2022 2:33 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:In the weeks that follow that return Manticore got at least 22 IAN SD(P)s out of their Keyhole II refit, and seemingly scrounged up Apollo loads for them -- that was the Task Force 16 that joined 8th fleet just over a week before the BoM (and more than doubled its force of Keyhole II SD(P)s.


That's probably all the production that had started to pick up while Eighth Fleet was away. The turnaround time to go out to Lovat and come back was probably around 4 weeks. And given that McKeon had the reloads for Eighth at the start of the BoM, it's possible that they hadn't even been fully loaded yet.

There just weren't ammo dumps full of Apollo missiles to hand out - basically they'd have had maybe 8 weeks worth of production; outside of what was in 8th fleet's pod bays. That's not much, and most of it would have been at Trevor's Star in the ammo ships of 8th Fleet's logistics train.


There's also the point that they weren't thinking of arming the defences. They knew they'd have to, eventually. But the Alliance Admiralty was thinking that, by keeping the Havenites on their toes with the Eighth Fleet Sword of Damocles, they would stand on the defensive. The entire strategy of the war was about keeping the Havenites on the defensive, because the RHN did indeed have more ships -- far more ships -- than the Alliance did, was outproducing them and would continue outproducing for a few more months. There's also probably a bit of blind spot, thinking of the Havenites as Peeps that had to keep ships over problematic colonies to keep them from revolting, which they now didn't.

The Alliance strategy was set and they failed to reevaluate. We've discussed this before and it clearly no one in the Alliance was seeing Apollo for as big a game changer as it was (granted, you do want to underestimate your own capabilities). Theisman and his analysts did.
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