Bit of Analysis: Honor Harrington III

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-19 11:06pm

I believe an even dozen aboard a Shrike or Ferret.

I think I'd bet on the Rolands if they started off concentrated at MDM ranges. Both sides have hellacious missile defenses, but given 20 Rolands and the ability to stack salvos up to six deep, I'd give them good odds on killing that many LACs. Of course, just a couple of Shrikes getting into beam range could end them.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-07-19 11:53pm

Wouldn't count on it, IIRC, those Grasers are what a Pre-War CA would have fitted. And those missile launchers are the off-bore types IIRC, so if engaging on a broadside it can bring both its fore and aft tubes into play at the same time. They are the same model tubes that the Saganami-C fits, probably the same as the Nike. And of course the Roland has two-phase bow walls and fairly sure stern walls as well.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-20 02:03am

Also, the Roland can roll ship and fire both 'broadsides' (actually fore and aft torpedo tubes, whatever) from under cover of its impenetrable wedge bands. That makes it very hard to launch an effective attack with Shrikes; you'd have to twist the LAC and fire perpendicular to the line of flight to engage.

Of course, after one firing pass from the Shrikes, the Rolands have probably lost the advantage of whatever remote drones allow them to do that, assuming they ever had a (miniaturized) version of the Keyhole system in the first place.

Mr Bean wrote:The Roland is an excellent example of building not to meet the role but the strategy. It's a shitty destroyer even if yes the manning numbers are amazing. These things are more like destroyer sized LACs than proper destroyers. I wonder how a hypothetical 20 rolands vs 100 Shrike matchup would go? Since the Shrike has roughly a ten person crew to the Rolands 62?

Well, in this case they represent the RMN more or less giving up on using destroyers for their traditional mission; presumably that will now be the Avalons' job. Or the job of whatever class picks up where the Wolfhound-class destroyers leave off. Basically they represent the Alexander admiralty saying:

"Right now we have an urgent, desperate need for MDM-capable combatants. Even if the ships thus produced are absobloodylutely useless when the war is over, current production must prioritize that need. We can rely on the numerous destroyers built during or prior to the First Havenite War for peacekeeping duties, their manning requirements are steep but not insurmountably so. We can always start building more 'normal' destroyers if and when the RMN's immediate strategic needs go back to 'normal' as of 1900 PD."

Destroyers are quick to build and easy to get budget approval for even in peacetime, so it's not surprising that 'what destroyer-sized ships is your navy building' will tend to reflect what kind of destroyer-sized ships your navy needs right NOW.

Witness the swarms of destroyer escorts, antisubmarine warfare frigates, and minesweepers (many of them never actually used to sweep mines) built during WWII, many of which were scrapped almost immediately afterwards. No navy really wanted them in the permanent order of battle, but the constraints of having to escort huge numbers of convoys across large oceans while hunting down swarms of enemy submarines demanded mass production of ship types that nobody really bothered with before or since.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-23 04:01pm

Had to break it up, Solon part 1.

Honor frowned and rubbed the tip of her nose. All their planning had assumed Lorn would be the target more likely to be covered by mobile units, which was why she'd swapped Alice Truman two of Alistair McKeon's superdreadnought divisions and Matsuzawa Hirotaka's older battlecruisers in return for Michelle Henke's more modern but understrength squadron. She'd also given Alice Winston Bradshaw's Seventh Cruiser Squadron, with its four Edward Saganami-C-class cruisers, while she took Charise Fanaafi's CruRon 12, with its older Saganami and Star Knight-class cruisers. Still, they'd anticipated more defensive strength than this for a target as populous and economically important as Solon.

Force mix as Honor hits Solon and Alice Truman goes to Lorn.

"I make it two superdreadnoughts," she continued after moment, "plus seven battlecruisers and roughly—" she consulted a display sidebar "—a hundred and ninety LACs."

"For mobile units, yes, Your Grace," Jaruwalski agreed. "But it looks like they've got a fairly dense shell of missile pods in close to the planetary industry around Arthur."

"And another little clutch here, around Merlin," Honor pointed out, and frowned some more. "That's a rather strange spot for them, wouldn't you say?"

Apparent defenders of Solon: 2 SD, 7 BC, 190 LACs. Also, a crapload of pods and a small cluster of ships around the gas giant Merlin. All planets in the Solon system are named for Arthurian myth, a convention I heartily approve of.

"Go ahead." Honor nodded. "And tell him to doublecheck his alternate recovery points with his COLACs."

"Of course, Your Grace," Jaruwalski said, then paused, looking at her admiral thoughtfully. "Um, is there some particular reason you wanted to do that, Your Grace?"

"Nothing I can put a finger on," Honor said after a moment. "I guess I'm just a little antsy. As you say, we'd anticipated a significantly heavier defensive force for a system this important."

Honor's being cautious.

"I suppose part of it could just be the fact that Solon lies right in the middle of a gravity wave," she continued aloud. "I always get a sort of uncomfortable feeling between my shoulder blades in a case like this."

Jaruwalski nodded. No flag officer really liked attacking a star system which lay in the middle of a hyper-space gravity wave—not unless she was totally confident she'd brought along enough firepower to take the system outright—for a very simple reason. A starship could not enter a gravity wave and survive without functioning Warshawski sails, and no ship could produce a Warshawski sail if it had lost an alpha node out of one of its impeller rings. Which meant a single unlucky hit could leave a warship with otherwise trifling damage unable to withdraw into hyper if the rest of its task force or fleet had to run for it.

Frankly, Jaruwalski suspected that was one reason Honor had assigned herself to command the Solon attack. Well, that and the fact that they'd anticipated—erroneously, as it turned out—that Solon, with its heavily populated planet and relatively thriving economy would have considerably heavier fixed defenses than Lorn.

Solon's in the middle of a grav wave, so like with Adler and Basilisk, any ship that loses an alpha node isn't going home.

"Twenty-eight point sources, Sir. It looks like seven superdreadnoughts or carriers, eleven battlecruisers or heavy cruisers, and nine light cruisers or destroyers, all on our side of the primary and right on the limit. Plus, of course, whatever they left in-system to keep an eye on us."

"Of course." Durand nodded, and he and the lieutenant exchanged wolflike grins.

"Sir," a communications rating said respectfully, "Governor Mathieson wants to know if she should begin evacuating the platforms?"

"By all means," Durand said. "And remind her to be obvious about it."

Evac of the orbital platforms, and Honor's forces.

The six CLACs carried over six hundred and seventy LACs between them, but she was leaving HMS Unicorn's wing behind to provide security for Miklós weakly armed carriers. She was also leaving three of Mary Lou Moreau's light cruisers—Tisiphone, Samurai, and Clotho—to help keep an eye on things, but the rest of the task force headed steadily in-system with her flagship.

Honor leaves the carriers outside the hyper-limit with 110 LACs and three light cruisers for protection.

"But you're still picking up those grav-pulses?" she asked.

"Yes, Your Grace." The com officer nodded his head at Jaruwalski. "Captain Jaruwalski's arrays are actually picking up most of them, but we've been looking at them over here, as well. So far, it all looks like our own early-generation traffic, probably from fixed recon arrays scattered around the system. Their pulse repetition frequency rate's still on the low side, so the information they're passing is probably limited, but there are at least a couple of stations out there with a higher PRF."

"Can you localize the more capable transmitters?"

"We've nailed down two of them, Your Grace," Jaruwalski reported. "One of them seems to be aboard this space station."

A red sighting ring popped into existence around the system's main space station as she spoke. It was a big thing, though no more than twenty percent the size of Hephaestus, back home.

"And the other?" Honor asked, eyes narrowing intently.

"The other one is out here, Your Grace."

Jaruwalski dropped another icon into the display. This one appeared to be in orbit around Merlin, which put it over forty light-minutes outside the system hyper limit on the far side of the primary.

Honor's close. Havenite FTL comm still doesn't have the sort of speed and bandwidth of Manticore, and is still very detectable.

"Sidemore," Honor said. "They're taking a page from Sidemore!"

Honor figures it out, just from that message traffic.

"Yes, Your Grace?" Vice Admiral Samuel Miklós said as he appeared on Honor's com display.

"It's a trap, Samuel," Honor said flatly. The FTL com grav pulses meant there was no light-speed lag in their conversation at this short range, and Miklós' eyes widened in surprise. "I can't prove it—yet," she continued, "but I'm sure of it. Get your carriers out. Go to Omega One."

The carriers get out. Manticoran FTL comm tech is now up to streaming video.

The dispatch boat one light-minute outside Merlin's orbit received the Durand's FTL transmission, relayed to its light-speed communications arrays by the Tarantula net, seventy-two seconds after it was transmitted. The boat's computers updated, and it translated smoothly across the alpha wall. Javier Giscard's task force was waiting exactly where it had been for the past week and a half, and the dispatch boat quickly relayed the tactical update to his flagship.

The Haven Tarantula system is a network of stealthed sensor platforms and bulkier FTL comm relays, allowing easy communication and very nearly duplicating what Manticore can do with recon platforms and early-warning nets with integral FTL comms.

"Actually catching them that far outside the limit would have been problematical, at best, Marius," he said. "You know how hard it is a to plot a hyper jump this short. And they weren't exactly likely to be sitting there with their hyper generators off-line and their impeller nodes cold. Unless we'd translated down right on top of them, they'd have had time to get into hyper before we could range on them." He shrugged. "I'd figured we were going to lose them from the moment the Manties left them behind. However," his grin turned positively lupine, "if the carriers are gone, the LACs are stuck, aren't they?"

Giscard's not that bothered that the carriers got away.

"It's confirmed, Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said. "Three separate forces, a total of eighteen wallers and six CLACs, plus screening elements. We're designating the Arthur detachment Bogey One, the task group to system north is Bogey Two, the one to system south is Bogey Three, and the one astern of us is Bogey Four."

"And their units are evenly distributed between Two, Three, and Four?"

"That's what it looks like, Your Grace."

Giscard's forces, outnumbering Honor 9 to 1 in podnoughts, 3 to 1 if she tries to punch through one group and run.

The good news was that the three ambushing task groups had clearly been waiting in place in hyper, motionless relative to Solon. They'd come across the alpha wall with an effectively zero velocity, and though they were accelerating hard at five hundred and twenty-nine gravities, which meant their compensator safety margins must be down to zero, it was going to take them time to build a vector, whereas her own command was already up to over fourteen thousand kilometers per second. Moreover, her maximum acceleration rate was higher than theirs, so the force astern of them couldn't possibly overtake them unless they suffered drive damage. The bad news was that they were only thirty million kilometers back . . . and on low-powered settings, current-generation Havenite MDMs had a powered range of almost sixty-one million kilometers from rest.

Some of the fun realities of MDM combat, Bogey Four can't possibly catch up to them, but they're in MDM range and they can be held in that range a good long time.

"Missile separation!" Andrea Jaruwalski announced. "I have multiple missile separations. Range at launch three-zero-point-four-five million kilometers. Time to attack range seven minutes!"

"Understood. Do not return fire."

"Do not return fire, aye, aye, Ma'am," Jaruwalski replied.

Seven minutes for Haven MDMs to cross 30.45 million klicks. I suspect they're at a range where they can set at least one drive to max accel, which is some of the flexibility MDMs give you. Honor orders them to take it, they'll need their missiles soon enough.

Each of Javier Giscard's six SD(P)s could roll six pods simultaneously, one pattern every twelve seconds, and each pod contained ten missiles, each a bit larger than the Royal Manticoran Navy's own first-generation MDMs. The range was extremely long for accuracy, especially using Havenite fire control systems, so Giscard opted for maximum density salvos, both to saturate the enemy's defenses and to give him more possibilities of hits.

Each of his ships deployed six patterns—a total of one hundred and eight pods—programmed for staggered launch. And then, precisely on schedule, all of them launched and sent a total of almost eleven hundred multi-drive missiles screaming up Task Force 82's wake.

Each podnought sets up a salvo of 1080 missiles, possibly the limit of their fire-control links. Please note, as of Thunderbolt, Haven MDM pods were bigger but carried far fewer missiles than Manty ones, Giscard's command however have some of the newest ships to get out of Bolthole with adapted Manty tech captured in Thunderbolt or gifted by Erewhon, they were training up for the next big offensive before being detached and put under Giscard for this trap. So it's not that surprising they have ten birds to a pod.

Seventy-two seconds later, a second, identical salvo roared out of its pods.

And seventy-two seconds after that, a third.

In the space of just over thirteen minutes, eleven salvos—just under twelve thousand missiles—went hurtling after Task Force 82.

You know, after a while of these supermassive missile salvoes, it just becomes impossible to connect emotionally. I mean, instead of the "Crap, that's a lot of missiles" from the first pod uses I now go "Yeah, but each individual salvo is just over a thousand. They can take it."

In a traditional engagement, the pursuing Republican superdreadnoughts would have been able to fire only a handful of missiles from their bow-mounted chase tubes. In an era of pod-layers, that limitation had long since disappeared, but what remained true was that missiles closing from directly ahead or directly astern faced the weakest defensive fire. There simply wasn't room to mount as many point defense laser clusters and counter-missile tubes on a warship's ends as on her broadside. The clusters mounted were the most powerful ones in her entire armament, but there could be only a few of them. Telemetry links to counter-missiles were also limited, and the fact that her wedge offered no protection against fire from those angles only made the situation worse.

And, of course, just to make things even better from Task Force 82's perspective, Havenite MDMs carried bigger and more powerful warheads as compensation for their poorer accuracy and penetration aids.

Haven still has bigger missiles with bigger warheads, just like when they first cracked the pods. Chase armament still has the least point defense and fire-control links (less of a problem with Keyhole) just because there's less space for it all. Particularly if the rear area is dominated by massive pod-bay doors. Of course, pod-layers and pod-towing ships can fire arbitrarily large numbers of missiles before or behind them.

"Enemy fire appears to be tracking in on Imperator and Intolerant," Jaruwalski reported tensely.

The Invictuses, naturally.

"But maybe not the smartest targeting," Honor replied calmly. Brigham looked at her, and Honor shrugged. "I admit, it would pay the highest dividend if they managed to knock out an alpha node on one of the superdreadnoughts, but their defenses are a lot tougher than anyone else's, and given the geometry, they'll have a long time to throw missiles at us. If I were in command over there, I'd start with the battlecruisers, or maybe even the heavy cruisers."

"Kill the weaker platforms first and attrit our missile defenses," Brigham said.

"Exactly. Each of them represents a smaller percentage of our total defensive capability, but they'd be a lot easier to kill or cripple." Honor shrugged again. "You could argue it either way, I suppose—go for the 'golden BB' on an SD(P), or chew up the weaker escorts first. Personally, I'd have done it the other way."

Honor's commentary on Giscard's targeting priorities.

The powered range from rest for the Mark 31 counter—missile was 3,585,556 kilometers, with a flight time of seventy-five seconds. Given the geometry of the engagement, effective range at launch was over 12.5 million kilometers, and the defensive missiles started to go out ninety seconds before the Havenite MDMs reached standoff attack range of their targets. The Mod-2-XR counter-missile launcher had a cycle time of eight seconds, which meant there was time for eleven launches per tube.

Weber's trouble with significant figures. The latest CM launcher can fire off one bird every 8 seconds.

In the old days—all of four T-years ago—that wouldn't have mattered all that much, since the interference of the counter—missiles' own wedges would have blinded follow-up launches. Even now, that would have been true of a Havenite ship, although with the changes Shannon Foraker had made, any ship in a Havenite formation could now "manage" any other ship's counter-missiles, as long as both units had arranged the handoff prior to launch. That meant a Republican formation with the same degree of separation between units as Task Force 82 could have managed perhaps three times the number of counter-missiles it once could have.

But the Royal Manticoran Navy had added the Keyhole platforms to its bag of tricks.

Instead of a half-dozen or a dozen counter-missiles per ship, they could bring the fire of their entire broadside counter-missile batteries to bear. They weren't restricted to the telemetry links physically mounted on their after hammerheads; they had sufficient links to control all of their counter-missiles aboard each Keyhole, and each ship had two Keyholes deployed. And as missile defense Plan Romeo rolled Honor's ships up on their sides, those platforms gained sufficient "vertical" separation to see past the interference of subsequent counter-missile salvos fired at far tighter intervals than had ever before been possible.

They still couldn't control eleven salvos . . . but they could control eight, and each of those eight contained far more missiles than anyone else could have managed.

Javier Giscard's staff had anticipated no more than five CM launches, and they'd allowed for an average of only ten counter-missiles per ship, for a total of two hundred per launch. Their fire plans had been predicated on facing somewhere around a thousand ship-launched CMs, and perhaps another thousand or so from the Katanas.

What they got was over seventy-two hundred from Honor's starships alone.

Luckily, Keyhole lets them fire equally vast swarms of counter missiles. The sort of revolution Keyhole is for missile defense and that Giscard clearly wasn't expecting anything like it, even though Haven has apparently worked out a broadly similar system, networking, data-sharing and handing off between ships.

"Your Grace, they've ceased fire!" Andrea Jaruwalski reported jubilantly.

"No, they haven't," Honor replied quietly. Jaruwalski looked at her, and Honor smiled thinly. "What they're doing over there right this minute, Andrea, is deploying a lot more pods. I'd guess they'll probably roll at least ten or twelve patterns each. Sequencing that many launches for a simultaneous time on target will be complicated, but not all that difficult."

Setting up a salvo dense enough to overwhelm their missile defense.

"So the next salvo is going to be just a bit more difficult to kill. In which case," Honor said grimly, "it may be time to distract them just a bit. I want the battlecruisers held in reserve—they don't have enough ammo capacity to use up pods at this range—but Imperator and Intolerant will engage the enemy. Pick one superdreadnought and pound it, Andrea."

Honor strikes back.

Javier Giscard's task group abruptly altered heading by ninety degrees, bringing its broadsides to bear on Task Force 82. The maneuver cut their acceleration towards the Manticoran ships to zero. But their relative velocity was losing ground steadily, anyway, and the turn also brought all of their broadside fire control to bear. Which meant they had many times as many control links as they'd had before. He was effectively conceding the pursuit in order to maximize his chances of crippling one or more of his foes.

They had to turn their broadsides on to manage that many missiles.

They couldn't possibly have enough control links to manage that many missiles simultaneously, Honor thought. But the way the individual components of the enormous salvo were spreading out and separating, it looked as if they'd come up with a data sharing approach similar to that of the Alliance. If she was right, their control circuits were bouncing back and forth between individual sub flights of missiles, which was going to cost them even more in accuracy. But given the size of the attack wave it made possible, they probably figured the new technique was well worth it.

And they're probably right about that, too, she told herself.

Honor's thoughts on the networking approach to fire control.

"They're moving their LACs in to intercept," Lieutenant Carter announced, his voice a bit hoarse.

LACs as missile defense platforms.

ONI estimated that the latest Havenite SD(P)s carried approximately the same number of missile pods as a Medusa-class. Assuming that was accurate, then each of the six superdreadnoughts pursuing her task force carried five hundred pods. They'd expended at least a hundred and sixty each in the first exchange, and there had to be at least a thousand pods in this monster salvo. That came to a total of somewhere around two thousand. So, if the six of them carried three thousand pods between them, that meant they'd have expended two-thirds of their total ammunition allotment by the time these missiles arrived.

They can't sustain this level of fire, she told herself. On the other hand, if they get through with enough of it this time around, it may not matter.

Again we see that ammunition and combat endurance are a big deal with podnoughts. Half an hour in and Giscard's group has burned through 67% of their pods. Probably. Hard numbers on the two classes of Haven SD(P)s just aren't out there. Hopefully that will change with House of Lies.

Task Force 82's missiles roared down on the superdreadnought RHNS Conquete. There were, in fact, two hundred and forty attack missiles and forty-eight EW platforms in the lead salvo. Half of the EW birds were Dragon's Teeth, and as they entered Bogie Four's counter-missile envelope, they suddenly appeared on the Havenite tracking displays as two hundred and forty additional attack missiles. Counter-missiles which had been locked onto them suffered massive confusion as their targets abruptly shoaled into literally dozens of false images. Other counter-missiles, which had been earmarked for genuine threats, diverted to the new targets, spending themselves uselessly.

Fourteen of the Dragon's Teeth survived to cross the first interception zone. Six of them survived to cross the second interception zone. Two of them made it halfway across the inner counter-missile zone. But before the last of them was destroyed, they'd carried a hundred and fifty-six attack missiles and fourteen Dazzler EW platforms with them.

Laser clusters tracked onto the surviving Manticoran missiles, but those missiles were closing at sixty-two percent of light-speed. Each cluster had an effective range of 150,000 kilometers, but Manticoran MDMs had a standoff attack range of 40,000 kilometers . . . and it took them barely half a second to cross the intervening 110,000 kilometers. There were literally thousands of laser clusters aboard the superdreadnoughts and their escorting Cimeterres, but they got at most one shot each.

And just before they fired, the fourteen surviving Dazzlers erupted in bursts of jamming that blinded sensors searching desperately for targets.

Despite everything the superior Manticoran EW could do, Shannon Foraker's defensive doctrine worked. Not as well as a Manticoran defense might have, perhaps, but sheer volume of firepower still made itself felt. Of the two hundred and forty attack missiles in the salvo, only eight survived to attack range.

How Giscard's Bogey Four handles a thousand incoming missiles.

It was the Republic's turn, and the tsunami of missiles crashed into Task Force 82's outer counter-missile zone. Havenite EW might not be as good as the RMN's, but it did its best, and that best was much better than it once had been.

Almost eleven thousand MDMs had been launched. Six hundred and seventeen had simply become lost and wandered away as Bogie Four's fire control strained to meet the demands placed on it. The remaining 10,183 continued to charge forward as the Mark 31s came to meet them. Twenty-six hundred of them died in the outer interception zone. Another three thousand two hundred died in the intermediate zone, and the Mark 31s killed another two thousand nine hundred in the inner zone. But then it was their turn to slash across the laser clusters' engagement envelope in less than a second, and there were still 1,472 of them left. Two hundred were EW platforms, and the targeting solutions of the other twelve hundred were far poorer than Task Force 82's had been, but there were a great many of them.

The last-ditch lasers aboard the warships and their escorting LACs killed over nine hundred. Of the three hundred and seventy-two surviving attack missiles, a hundred and three wasted themselves uselessly against their targets' impeller wedges. Of the other two hundred and sixty-nine, a hundred and seventy-two attacked the two superdreadnoughts, and Imperator and Intolerant heaved as lasers ripped into them. Their sidewalls intercepted and blunted most of the lasers, but it was the turn of Manticoran armor to shatter under the pounding.

Honor's TF 82 takes ten times as many missiles and this time two hundred get through.

Imperator emerged with relatively minor damage, including the loss of three grasers and half a dozen laser clusters, but Intolerant staggered as dozens of hits hammered her thick, multi-ply armor. Huge splinters of it blew away, energy mounts and laser clusters were wiped out, and communication and fire control emitters, radar and gravitic arrays shattered. She bucked in agony under the pounding . . . and then a final, freak hit ripped straight into the gaping missile hatch in the center of her after hammerhead.

Rear Admiral Morowitz's flagship rocked as the powerful energy blast smashed forward along the unarmored, open central core of a pod-layer. Hundreds of missile pods were wrecked, turned into twisted and shattered alloy and wreckage. The missile handling rails were torn apart, and over thirty of her crew were killed.

Yet terrible as the damage was, BuShips had considered the possibility of just such a hit. Unlike the original Medusa/-Harrington-class SD(P)s, the Invictus-class had been built from the beginning with a double-sided core hull wrapped around its hollow center, and the walls of her central missile well were armored almost as heavily as her flanks. The cofferdamming and compartmentalization weren't as deep, but they were far deeper than in the earlier classes, and the additional defenses proved their worth as a ring of vaporized and splintered alloy blasted back out of the shattered missile hatch, for the ship survived. Not only survived, but maintained her maximum acceleration while her antimissile defenses continued to engage the last of the incoming MDMs.

* * *

"Your Grace, Intolerant's lost her entire offensive missile armament and both Keyholes," Jaruwalski said in a tight voice. "Casualties are heavy, and her flag bridge took a heavy hit. Sounds like something blew back through CIC. Admiral Morowitz and most of his staff are down." She shook her head. "It doesn't sound good for the Admiral, Ma'am."

Damage from those two hundred missiles, not enough to kill or cripple either ship, though Intolerant has been mission-killed. Oh, and two BCs between them took minor damage about 74 casualties. All in all, looking pretty good after 11,000 missiles were launched at them.

"At least five more hits, Your Grace," Jaruwalski reported. "Her wedge strength is dropping, and her point defense is weakening."

"Which would be nice, if we still had the missiles to pound her with," Mercedes Brigham said quietly to Honor. Honor glanced at her, and the chief of staff bobbed her head in Jaruwalski's direction. "Do you want to use the Agamemnons to make up for Intolerant's pods?" she asked.

"No." Honor shook her head, watching Giscard's second stupendous missile wave overtake her ships from astern. "This has to be the last launch this size they can manage. They've shot themselves dry to manage this kind of density, and I won't do the same thing with Mike's battlecruisers just to try to kill a ship that can't shoot at us anymore, anyway. Not when we may need them worse shortly."

One last super-salvo and they're clear of Bogey Four. Their chosen SD target, RHNS Coquette finally drops out of the fight.

The attacking MDMs came sweeping in, like a comber rearing higher as it neared the beach, and Mark 31s, Vipers, and standard LAC counter-missiles from the Ferrets, slashed into it. The loss of Intolerant's Keyhole platforms weakened the defensive umbrella significantly, but the time the Havenites' needed to "stack" patterns had increased the interval between salvos enough for Honor's LACs to drop back and take up optimum intercept positions astern of her starships.

Several dozen MDMs lost lock on their programmed targets as the LACs' impeller signatures cluttered the range. They quested for replacements, obedient to their onboard programming, and twenty-six of them found LACs. Nineteen of them got through, and seven Shrikes, nine Ferrets and three Katanas—along with the hundred and ninety men and women aboard them—died.

Thirty-seven other MDMs got through everything Task Force 82 could throw at them. Six of the leakers were EW platforms; the other thirty-one streaked in on Imperator and Intolerant.

Same salvo size but this time they stop 99.7+% of it.

"Four hits starboard aft," Commander Thompson reported to Rafe Cardones from Damage Control. "Two more midships, about frame niner-six-five. Graser Twenty-Three's out of the net, but the mount's undamaged; it's prepared to fire in local control. No major penetrations and no personnel casualties, but we've lost a couple of laser clusters from the after starboard quadrant, and we're down one beta node from the after ring. I think I can get the node back in about twenty minutes, but I could be wrong."

Imperator takes minor damage.

"Intolerant reports loss of her entire starboard sidewall aft of midships, Your Grace. She has at least three core hull breaches, and one fusion plant's off-line. Her shipboard fire control and point defense are seriously compromised."

-snip-

"Honestly?" Sharif shrugged. "Not good, Your Grace. I've got serious personnel casualties, and Engineering's lost about twenty-five percent of its damage control remotes—almost a hundred percent in the missile core. Our compensator's undamaged, and we've got enough node redundancy to maintain military power, but our offensive combat capability outside energy range is shot. And I'm afraid our missile defense pretty much sucks right now."

Intolerant, not so much. Definite mission kill.

"That's what I was afraid of." Honor glanced at the astrogation display, then looked back at Sharif. "We've run out of Bogey Four's MDM range, and on our present heading, we'll just scrape by outside Bogey Three's envelope. But that's going to take us within range of the pods they've got deployed around Arthur in about another fourteen minutes. How much missile defense can you restore in that much time?"

The astrography before they can get out of here. Both Bogey Three and the system defense pods are going to get a shot at them before they go.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-23 06:57pm

Ahriman238 wrote:You know, after a while of these supermassive missile salvoes, it just becomes impossible to connect emotionally. I mean, instead of the "Crap, that's a lot of missiles" from the first pod uses I now go "Yeah, but each individual salvo is just over a thousand. They can take it."

Well, the catch is that she's only got two SDs here- it's the tiny tiny force at her disposal that makes this tricky, not so much the size of the incoming launches.

It really is kind of exasperating, the idea that it takes 9:1 odds just to force a tactical defeat on Honor's force, although I'm not sure all the 9:1 odds ever actually engaged.

Javier Giscard's task group abruptly altered heading by ninety degrees, bringing its broadsides to bear on Task Force 82. The maneuver cut their acceleration towards the Manticoran ships to zero. But their relative velocity was losing ground steadily, anyway, and the turn also brought all of their broadside fire control to bear. Which meant they had many times as many control links as they'd had before. He was effectively conceding the pursuit in order to maximize his chances of crippling one or more of his foes.
They had to turn their broadsides on to manage that many missiles.

Well heck, in the ten or twenty minutes it takes to turn, organize the salvo, fire, and steer it to the target, the opportunity cost in acceleration is only... what, roughly 500g is about five km/s per second... call it ROUGHLY 1000 seconds of acceleration sacrificed... OK, five thousand kilometers per second. Which isn't enough to let the Manticoran fleet escape missile range in any significant length of time; Giscard will still be able to shoot his ships dry before the RMN force escapes.

How Giscard's Bogey Four handles a thousand incoming missiles.

Yeah. So six Havenite SD(P)s (with, presumably, some screen) can more or less tank a thousand Manticoran MDMs at this point. Conversely, two Manticoran SD(P)s with considerable screen can apparently tank a thousand Havenite MDMs, repeatedly in rapid succession.

Honor's TF 82 takes ten times as many missiles and this time two hundred get through.

Yes. It's not clear to me whether this is because 11000 missiles is "just barely enough," or whether it's simply a percentage issue. It sounds like TF 82 can physically fire enough shots to destroy all those missiles- but they're reduced to firing about one shot per missile rather than two or three, which means their probability of killing each missile is sharply reduced.

For real saturation by weight of fire, you'd need to physically shoot more missiles than they can counter in the time available... which would basically require Giscard to dump ALL his pods. He might not even have had time to set that up before the Manticoran counterfire reached his command.

Thirty-seven other MDMs got through everything Task Force 82 could throw at them. Six of the leakers were EW platforms; the other thirty-one streaked in on Imperator and Intolerant.
Same salvo size but this time they stop 99.7+% of it.

...Whyyyyy...

I mean, it looks like the only defensive tactical change is that the LACs are now directly in the path of the incoming salvo; apparently they weren't before. I don't see how that improves the probability of kills so much that it reduces the number of hits by a factor of six when one of Honor's SD(P)s has taken a mission-killing bombardment already.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-23 09:11pm

"Is Rifleman still clear, Mercedes?" she asked looking up from the damage reports.

"As far as we can tell, they don't haven't a clue where she is," Brigham replied.

"Good. But tell her to stay where she is until we clear the hyper limit." Brigham looked a question at her, and Honor smiled thinly. "Whoever's in charge on the other side has already demonstrated she's pretty good. At the moment, it looks like all her available units, aside from Bogey Four, are still accelerating in-system. They probably hope we'll take enough lumps from the Arthur pods to slow us down, let them overhaul. But if I were in command on the other side, and if I had enough hulls for it, I'd have at least one more task group waiting in hyper."

"To drop just outside the limit, right in our faces just when we think we're about to get away clean," Brigham said.

"Exactly. Mind you, I think the odds are good that they've committed everything they have already, but let's make sure before Rifleman hypers out to tell Samuel where to pick up his LACs."

They're going to do a quick RV with the carriers outside the hyper-limit to get as many of the LACs out as possible, the stealthed destroyer Rifleman, one of the two destroyers that scouted the system will play courier across the hyper-limit for this.

In Arthur orbit, the installation codenamed Moriarty came fully on-line for the first time. It wasn't a very huge installation. In fact, it was no larger than a heavy cruiser, and it had been transported in two prefabricated modules aboard a fleet supply ship, then assembled in place in less than forty-eight hours.

As warship tonnages went, four hundred thousand wasn't a lot . . . unless all of it was dedicated to fire control.

Moriarty was Shannon Foraker's system defense answer to the individual inferiority of the Republic's missile pods. The control station was a flat, light-drinking black, constructed of radar absorbent materials. It was almost impossible to detect, as long as it practiced strict emission-control discipline, and the Manticoran recon arrays had missed it entirely.

Meet Moriarty, Shannon Foraker's solution to the fire-control problem and the primary reason people say that Foraker is better than Hemphill. She's keeping up with the Manties and even getting ahead in some areas through creativity rather than coasting by on a superior tech-base. Moriarty is a cruiser-sized unmanned space station, and aside from the stealth systems it's all fire-control and computer support. It sits in the center coordinating a vast network of satellites not unlike Keyhole, albeit cruder, that each provide additional fire-control links and hand-off when one platform or another loses signal, and the whole setup is attended by a vast cloud of missile pods. Put it all together and you have a system for providing fire-control to ungodly huge swarms of missiles. Just how many depends how many platforms are in the net.

Moriarty had only one real weakness, aside from the fact that if it had been detected, killing it would have been relatively simple. That weakness was the light-speed limitation on its telemetry. It simply couldn't provide real-time corrections as its missiles raced down range. On the other hand, neither could Honor's telemetry links. Aside from the superior seeking systems and more capable AIs aboard the Manticoran missiles, the accuracy playing field had just been leveled.

And the Republic's salvo contained sixty-two times as many missiles as the largest salvo TF 82 was firing.

Moriarty's weaknesses, it's limited by light-speed lag and is vulnerable to a single point of failure, the Moriarty station itself.

"Estimate seventeen thousand—I say again, one-seven thousand—inbound! Time to attack range, seven-point-one minutes!"

For just a moment, Honor's brain flatly refused to believe the numbers. Their scout ships' arrays had detected only four hundred pods in orbit around Arthur. The maximum number of missiles aboard them should only have been four thousand!

Moriarty gets it's activation orders and gets in the game, coordinating a launch of over nine thousand, in fact, almost twice that, missiles from Bogey One.

"Where the hell did they all come from?" Brigham demanded, and Honor looked at her.

"The battlecruisers," she said, her mind going back to the Battle of Hancock.

"Battlecruisers?" Brigham looked incredulous, and Honor chuckled without any humor at all.

"They aren't battlecruisers, Mercedes; they're minelayers. The Havenites build their fast fleet minelayers on battlecruiser hulls, just like we do. And we were so busy worrying about superdreadnoughts and pod-layers it never occurred to us to look closely at the 'battlecruisers.' So they've been sitting there, ever since they stopped accelerating, doing nothing but lay pods."

Minelayers as podlayers. It's funny because it's pretty much what Honor and Sarnow did at Hancock fifteen years ago.

"Engage Bogey One!" Honor snapped.

"Aye, aye, Ma'am," Jaruwalski responded. "Should I use the Agamemnons, too?"

"Yes," Honor replied. "Gamma sequence."

-snip-

Given the geometry—the effective closing speed between TF 82 and the launch platforms was almost thirty-six thousand KPS—the battlecruisers' Mark 16 MDMs, with one less "stage" than Imperator's larger missiles, had a maximum powered range of forty-two million kilometers. But the range was over fifty-three million, which meant the Mark 16s would have to coast ballistically for eleven million kilometers between stage activations. That would add an additional minute and a half to their flight time, bringing it to a total of thirteen and a half minutes, whereas Imperator's more powerful missiles could make the entire run under power, in only seven. Moreover, the smaller missiles' closing speed relative to their targets would be over twenty thousand KPS lower.

But by using the gamma sequence she and Jaruwalski had worked out months ago, Imperator would roll her first half dozen patterns with missile settings which duplicated those of the Mark 16s. The Agamemnons would roll six patterns each at the same rate, which would take seventy-two seconds, and those six salvos—each of two hundred and seventy-six missiles—would make the crossing at the Mark 16s' speed.

Only after the smaller MDMs were away would Imperator begin firing full-power patterns of her own, one double pattern every twenty-four seconds. The first of her 120-strong salvos would arrive on target eight and a half minutes after she first began rolling pods, five minutes before the battlecruisers' fire.

Coordinating MDM strikes, where the dual-drive missiles will have to coast along for a bit between drive activations. Got to love the flexibility of MDMs.

It took the massive attack seven minutes to reach Task Force 82. Of the seventeen thousand missiles in the initial launch, only sixty lost their telemetry links and self-destructed after wandering off course. The Mark 31s killed over three thousand in the outermost intercept zone. In the middle zone, bolstered by the Katanas' Vipers and the standard counter-missiles from the Shrikes and Ferrets, they killed another four thousand. Jammers blinded another sixteen hundred missiles as they tried to settle into final acquisition, and the incredible cauldron of missile, starship, and LAC impeller wedges was too much for Moriarty's arthritic light-speed telemetry to sort out any longer.

The surviving eighty-three hundred MDMs dropped into autonomous mode as they hit the inner counter-missile zone. Shipboard EW did its best to spoof and blind the attackers, last-second decoy launches drew some of them astray, and a seemingly solid wall of Mark 31s met them head on.

Four thousand more MDMs were wiped out of space. Another eleven hundred fell prey to decoys or jamming. Three hundred of the survivors were penetration-aid EW platforms, without laser heads, and almost half the remaining twenty-nine hundred lost lock and reacquired not starships, but the nearer, more readily seen LACs. They streaked in to the attack, but Manticoran LACs were extraordinarily difficult targets. "Only" two hundred and eleven of them—and the twenty-one hundred of Honor's men and women aboard them—were killed.

And then the final sixteen hundred missiles attacked TF 82's starships, most of them targeted on the two superdreadnoughts.

The desperate missile defense. 17,000 inbound missiles and they stop 12,500. The LACs catch three thousand missiles and die saving the big ships, and 1600 get through to 'true' hyper-capable starships.

Honor clung to the arms of her command chair, feeling Imperator shudder under the pounding of her own hits, tasting Nimitz in the back of her brain, clinging to her with all his fierce love and devotion as death thundered and bellowed about their ship. Yet even as she did, her eyes were on the plot, watching the lethal wave of fire washing over Intolerant.

No one would ever know how many hits the superdreadnought took, but however many there were, it was too many. They ripped into her again, and again, and again, until, suddenly, she simply disappeared in the most brilliant, eye-tearing flash of them all.

Nor did she go alone. The light cruisers Fury, Buckler, and Atum vanished from Honor's plot, as did the battlecruisers Priam and Patrocles. The heavy cruisers Star Ranger and Blackstone were reduced to crippled hulks, coasting onward ballistically without power or drives. And HMS Ajax faltered suddenly as her entire after impeller ring went down.

Imperator took over a dozen direct hits of her own, yet the flagship's actual damage was incredibly light. Her thick armor shrugged off most of the hits with little more than superficial cratering, and despite the loss of half a dozen energy mounts, she remained fully combat capable.

Damage to Honor's forces. There goes Intolerant, plus two of her BC(P)s, two heavy and three light cruisers.

Honor gazed into the bitter ashes of her display, tasting the cruel irony of her flagship's apparent inviolability as she saw the harrowed wreckage of the rest of her command. Of the twenty starships and five hundred and sixty LACs she'd taken across the hyper limit, only twelve starships, all but two of them damaged, and three hundred and forty-nine LACs survived. And even as she watched, Ajax and the heavy cruiser Necromancer were falling behind due to impeller damage.

"Your Grace," Andrea Jaruwalski said quietly. Honor looked at her. "The remote arrays confirm the destruction of two of their minelayers and heavy damage to one of their superdreadnoughts."

Honor's losses, and the Havenites'.

"That's an interesting question." Henke managed to produce at least the parody of a smile. "Captain Mikhailov is dead, and things are . . . a bit confused over here, just now. Our rails and pods are still intact, and our fire control looks pretty good, but our point defense and energy armament took a real beating. The worst of it seems to be the after impeller ring, though. It's completely down."

-snip-

"Can you get her out?"

"I don't know," Henke admitted. "Frankly, it doesn't look good, but I'm not prepared to just write her off yet. Besides," she managed another smile, this one almost normal-looking, "we can't abandon very well."

"What do you mean?" Honor demanded.

"Both boat bays are trashed, Honor. The Bosun says she thinks she can get the after bay cleared, but it's going to take at least a half-hour. Without that—" Henke shrugged, and Honor bit the inside of her lip so hard she tasted blood.

Without at least one functional boat bay, small craft couldn't dock with Ajax to take her crew off. There were emergency personnel locks, but trying to lift off a significant percentage of her crew that way would take hours, and the battlecruiser carried enough emergency life pods for little more than half her total complement. There was no point carrying more, since only half her crew's battle stations were close enough to the skin of the hull to make a life pod practical.

Mike Henke's Ajax has at least temporarily lost hyper and a lot of normal speed, and without their boat bays they can't evac like the crew of Necromancer. Apparently there are only life-pods enough for half the crew, on the theory that most of the crew can't be close enough to a life-pod to make a difference anyway.

"Don't say it," she said, almost gently. "If we get the wedge back, we can probably play hide and seek with anything heavy enough to kill us. If we don't get it back, we're not getting out. It's that simple, Honor. And you know as well as I do that you can't hold the rest of the task force back to cover us. Not with Bogey Three still closing. Even just hanging around for a half-hour while we try to make repairs would bring you into their envelope, and your missile defense has been shot to shit."

-snip-

"Break north," Honor told her. "I'm going to drop our acceleration for about fifteen minutes." Henke looked as if she were about to protest, but Honor shook her head quickly. "Only fifteen minutes, Mike. If we go back to the best acceleration we can sustain at that point and maintain heading, we'll still scrape past Bogey Three at least eighty thousand kilometers outside its powered missile range."

"That's cutting it too close, Honor!" Henke said sharply.

"No," Honor said flatly, "it isn't, Admiral Henke. And not just because Ajax is your ship. There are seven hundred and fifty other men and women aboard her."

Henke looked at her for a moment, then inhaled sharply and nodded.

"When they see our accel drop, they'll have to act on the assumption Imperator has enough impeller damage to slow the rest of the task force," Honor continued. "Bogey Three should continue to pursue us on that basis. If you can get the after ring back within the next forty-five minutes to an hour, you should still be able to stay clear of Bogey Two, and Bogey One is pretty much scrap metal at this point. But if you don't get it back—"

Honor tries to lure some of the heat off of Ajax, buy them an hour to make repairs. And with their unsaid farewells, the chapter and Battle of Solon close. I think this is the first time Honor's lost a straight-up fight. Sure she got captured but that was a.) McKeon's command and b.) part of a deliberate sacrifice play to save their convoy. This time, she got mousetrapped, surprised by superior forces with new weapons whose existence she never suspected. And this time it was Honor who had to count victory in getting half her people out, Honor who ran.

"Welcome to Imperator, My Lords," she began, then chopped off in astonishment as Hamish turned and enfolded her in a fierce embrace. For just a moment, conscious of Caparelli's presence, she started to resist. But then she realized she tasted absolutely no surprise from the First Space Lord, and she abandoned herself—briefly, at least—to the incredible comfort of her husband's arms.

-snip-

"Have we gone public while I was away, Hamish?"

"I wouldn't put it quite that way," he replied. "A few people have either figured it out or been informed because it's just so much simpler that way. Thomas here falls into both categories. I informed him . . . and he'd already figured it out. Essentially, at least."

"Your Grace—Honor," Caparelli said with a crooked smile, "your relationship with Hamish has to be one of the worst kept secrets in the history of the Royal Manticoran Navy." Alarm flickered in her eyes, but he only chuckled. "I might add, however, that I doubt very much that any Queen's officer would breathe a word about it. If nothing else, he'd be terrified of what the rest of us would do to him when we found out."

It was headline news a year before it began. How's that for a poorly kept secret?

"I lost half my superdreadnoughts, sixty percent of my battlecruisers, half my heavy cruisers, thirty-eight percent of my light cruisers, and over forty percent of my LACs. In return for which I managed to destroy two minelayers and damage two superdreadnoughts, one of them a pre-pod relic. And to inflict absolutely no damage on the system's infrastructure which was my original objective." She smiled without a trace of humor. "That sounds like the dictionary definition of a 'fiasco' to me."

Honor's losses compared with Giscards and yeah, not hard to figure out who won that one.

She closed her eyes, her memory replaying the last she'd seen—the last she would ever see—of Michelle Henke. She and her other survivors had gotten across the hyper limit, with Bogey Two and Bogey Three in hot pursuit. Rifleman had performed her part of Omega One by translating up into hyper to rejoin Samuel Miklós' CLACs at the designated rendezvous once the task force's other survivors were across the limit. And Miklós' squadron had executed a flawless micro-jump to rendezvous with Honor's survivors, in turn. They'd gotten the surviving LACs aboard the carriers and translated out less than fifteen minutes before Bogey Three crossed the hyper limit after them, but that hadn't been soon enough to prevent her from knowing what happened.

She wished there'd been time for at least one last personal message, but Ajax's communications section had taken massive damage in the first salvo Bogey Two had fired into Henke's lamed flagship. There'd been no way to communicate—even the remote sensor arrays had been too far away to see it clearly—but from the sensor recordings, it looked as if Ajax had taken at least one battlecruiser with her. The explosion when her own fusion plants let go, however, had been far clearer.

"I left her," she said softly. "I left her behind to die."

Last stand of Ajax, Honor's guilt and how they got out with 60% of the LACs.

"As for your failure to hit your objectives, yes, you did. Admiral Truman, on the other hand, operating according to your plan, blew the Lorn shipyard, every bit of its supporting industry, and every mobile unit in the system into scrap for the loss of six LACs."

"I know she did," Honor conceded. "And I also know our primary objective was to force the Republic to redeploy, which—on the evidence of Solon—they've certainly done. But I feel depressingly confident that the way this story is going to be spun for their civilian population will dwell on how hard they hit my task force, not how well Alice's did."

"I think we can all safely depend upon that," Caparelli agreed. "Especially since you've been the one blacking their eyes up until now. The defeat of 'the Salamander'—and I agree that, however well you did to salvage what you did, it was a defeat—is going to be page-one news in every Peep 'fax. They're going to play it up to the max, exactly the way our own 'faxes have been playing up Eighth Fleet's successes.

Since when were you bothered by the Haven media, Honor? Of course they're going to make a big deal out of defeating the previously unbeaten Honor Harrington, and the Invincible Eighth Fleet, the force that makes Haven officers wake up in a cold sweat. Sure, it's not the same Eighth Fleet, but it carries the name and the traditions. Alice Truman made out like a bandit at Lorn.

"The initial report came in this morning. Their Admiral Tourville is apparently back from Marsh, and they've given him a new fleet to replace the one you trashed. Units under his command hit Zanzibar about the same time you were attacking Lorn and Solon."

-snip-

"How bad?" she repeated.

"Eleven SD(P)s and seven older superdreadnoughts," Caparelli said grimly. "Plus seven hundred LACs, six battlecruisers, and two heavy cruisers. Those were our losses. Most of the Zanzibaran Navy went with them. Not to mention," the First Space Lord added harshly, "the near total destruction of Zanzibar's deep-space industry. For the second time."

Oops? Sorry? Not sure how to respond to that, and they've apparently lost another 11 highly valuable SD(P)s. Operation Gobi was a smashing success for Haven.

"He came in with four full battle squadrons of pod-layers, and their battle squadrons are still eight ships strong. He also had a couple of divisions of carriers and at least two battlecruiser squadrons to support them, and although we'd reinforced heavily after Admiral al-Bakr's fiasco—and I use the word deliberately," he added bitterly "—it wasn't heavily enough. He hit the defenses like a hammer, and he started right out by sweeping the asteroid belt with remote arrays of his own, followed by LAC strikes on our predeployed pods. Not only that, he'd brought along fast colliers stuffed with additional missile pods. He left them tucked away in hyper, came in just far enough to draw our mobile units away from their own support bases, and engaged them at long range until both sides had burned most of their ammo. Then he pulled back across the limit, reammunitioned, and came right back in before we could replace the expended defense pods or get our own pod-layers back in-system to rearm. It was a massacre."

Tourville's forces and tactics at Zanzibar. I guess having pod-resupply right there is absurdly useful for a deep-strike raid.

"I think we can all safely agree," Caparelli continued, "that as things stand right this instant, it's going to be relatively easy for the Peeps to convince their public—and possibly even our own—that the momentum's just shifted. Which makes it even more imperative for us to convince them they're wrong."

"What do you have in mind, Sir Thomas?" Honor asked, watching his face closely.

"You know exactly what I have in mind, Honor," he told her. "That's one reason I came out here with Hamish. I know you're hurting, and I know your people have to be shocked by what happened at Solon. And I also know it's going to take at least several weeks for you to be in any position to plan and mount another op. But we need you—and your people—back in the saddle, and we need you there quickly. We'll do what we can to reinforce you and replace your losses, but it's essential, absolutely essential, that Eighth Fleet resume offensive operations at the earliest possible moment. We simply cannot afford to allow the enemy, or ourselves, to believe the initiative has passed into his hands."

Don't ask for much, do you? How about some replacements for the dead ships, at least?

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-23 09:36pm

Simon_Jester wrote:It really is kind of exasperating, the idea that it takes 9:1 odds just to force a tactical defeat on Honor's force, although I'm not sure all the 9:1 odds ever actually engaged.

They don't all engage, it takes multiple groups to box someone in inside a three-dimensional space so she has to engage at least two. And each of those forces has to be a viable threat to hers.

How Giscard's Bogey Four handles a thousand incoming missiles.
Yeah. So six Havenite SD(P)s (with, presumably, some screen) can more or less tank a thousand Manticoran MDMs at this point. Conversely, two Manticoran SD(P)s with considerable screen can apparently tank a thousand Havenite MDMs, repeatedly in rapid succession.

That they're the missile defense heavy SD(P)s counts for a lot, as does the BC(P)s and the hundreds of LACs. But honestly, probably the biggest difference is Keyhole and their new ability to spam counter missiles as fast as the launchers can cycle without losing track of any inbounds.

Thirty-seven other MDMs got through everything Task Force 82 could throw at them. Six of the leakers were EW platforms; the other thirty-one streaked in on Imperator and Intolerant.
Same salvo size but this time they stop 99.7+% of it.
...Whyyyyy...

I mean, it looks like the only defensive tactical change is that the LACs are now directly in the path of the incoming salvo; apparently they weren't before. I don't see how that improves the probability of kills so much that it reduces the number of hits by a factor of six when one of Honor's SD(P)s has taken a mission-killing bombardment already.

I think at this stage chance still plays a greater role in max-range MDM duels with fuckoff huge missile swarms than nay naval commander would like to think. I mean, during the Zanzibar probe 75% of the massive pod salvo just lost lock and wandered off. As far as I know nothing like that's happened since, but at 60 missiles got lost even with Moriarty, the space around a given target is a mess of decoys and jamming, hell if the LACs hadn't eaten those thousands of missiles by pure chance Honor would have lost most or all of her command right then and there.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-23 11:40pm

Ahriman238 wrote:Meet Moriarty, Shannon Foraker's solution to the fire-control problem and the primary reason people say that Foraker is better than Hemphill. She's keeping up with the Manties and even getting ahead in some areas through creativity rather than coasting by on a superior tech-base. Moriarty is a cruiser-sized unmanned space station, and aside from the stealth systems it's all fire-control and computer support. It sits in the center coordinating a vast network of satellites not unlike Keyhole, albeit cruder, that each provide additional fire-control links and hand-off when one platform or another loses signal, and the whole setup is attended by a vast cloud of missile pods. Put it all together and you have a system for providing fire-control to ungodly huge swarms of missiles. Just how many depends how many platforms are in the net.

I would definitely agree that Foraker is a superior designer of weapons systems, but think Hemphill is better at coming up with revolutionary concepts. Also, her gift for pressing them through in the face of political and traditionalist opposition is worthy of respect, even if it's a skill that Foraker does not need and which arguably is not relevant to actual talent at weapons design.

And then the final sixteen hundred missiles attacked TF 82's starships, most of them targeted on the two superdreadnoughts.
The desperate missile defense. 17,000 inbound missiles and they stop 12,500. The LACs catch three thousand missiles and die saving the big ships, and 1600 get through to 'true' hyper-capable starships.

OK, so clearly the upper limit of what TF 82 can handle in terms of salvo density is somewhere between 11000 and 17000 missiles, which is interesting because it's a fairly hard-and-fast figure. Also because as far as I can tell there have been no further significant advances in RMN antimissile capability from the time of At All Costs to the 'present' in the series.

So this gives us a good benchmark for what 'current' RMN ships of the latest classes can handle.

Damage to Honor's forces. There goes Intolerant, plus two of her BC(P)s, two heavy and three light cruisers.

Also, this is like the first time her command has gotten really pounded without she herself being on a ship that's taking a beating. It's like a Harrington death ride only with all the death happening to others...

Which I guess is a pity, but they can't play the "she gets captured" card even though that'd be very interesting at this moment in the war because getting Nimitz into telepathy range of Pritchart might potentially have short-circuited the whole Battle of Manticore.

Mike Henke's Ajax has at least temporarily lost hyper and a lot of normal speed, and without their boat bays they can't evac like the crew of Necromancer. Apparently there are only life-pods enough for half the crew, on the theory that most of the crew can't be close enough to a life-pod to make a difference anyway.

For the more heavily-manned prewar ships, you would also expect massive crew casualties from any attack on the ship that left it "in a sinking condition," i.e. one where you'd need to man the lifepods. So it may be a normal practice to have only the minimum necessary number of escape pods. Especially since each escape pod requires you to sacrifice not only internal volume on the ship, but also hull surface area, which is precious.

Honor tries to lure some of the heat off of Ajax, buy them an hour to make repairs. And with their unsaid farewells, the chapter and Battle of Solon close. I think this is the first time Honor's lost a straight-up fight. Sure she got captured but that was a.) McKeon's command and b.) part of a deliberate sacrifice play to save their convoy. This time, she got mousetrapped, surprised by superior forces with new weapons whose existence she never suspected. And this time it was Honor who had to count victory in getting half her people out, Honor who ran.

Yes, true. Nimitz says as much to her later.

It was headline news a year before it began. How's that for a poorly kept secret?

To be fair, the rumor that it was true was in play; the rumor becoming reality not so much.

Since when were you bothered by the Haven media, Honor? Of course they're going to make a big deal out of defeating the previously unbeaten Honor Harrington, and the Invincible Eighth Fleet, the force that makes Haven officers wake up in a cold sweat. Sure, it's not the same Eighth Fleet, but it carries the name and the traditions. Alice Truman made out like a bandit at Lorn.

Well, Honor may take a certain pride in being the RHN's personal boogeyman, and that pride is now cracked. She's also in a depressed state over the death of a friend she's known for over forty years, and may be

Oops? Sorry? Not sure how to respond to that, and they've apparently lost another 11 highly valuable SD(P)s. Operation Gobi was a smashing success for Haven.

Well, more of the partly completed SD(P)s in Manticore are being completed, but yeah, this is keeping the overall RMN fleet strength limited in a way that is very valuable to Haven.

Don't ask for much, do you? How about some replacements for the dead ships, at least?

Hey, he said he'd do his best!

[His best is not too shabby as I recall]

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-25 01:22pm

"Chief of Naval Operations, arriving!" the announcement rang out, and Theisman smothered another grin.

Technically speaking, he should have been referred to as the Secretary of War, since the Secretary was the CNO's civilian superior. It was common knowledge throughout the Fleet, however, that he preferred to think of himself as still an honest admiral, not a politician, and he was always amused when the Navy's uniformed personnel chose to pander to that particular vanity of his.

Theisman's preference to be known as CNO among the Fleet.

"Thank you, Admiral." Theisman raised his voice slightly. "And while I'm at it, allow me to express my thanks—and the Republic's—to you and all the men and women under your command for a job very well done."

He still felt a bit silly playing the political leader, but he'd learned not to despise the role, and he saw the smiles on the faces of the officers and enlisted personnel in range of his voice. What he'd said would be relayed throughout the ship—and, later, throughout Giscard's entire command—with a speed which mocked the grav pulses of an FTL com. And although he knew Giscard understood what he was doing perfectly, he also saw the genuine pleasure in the other man's eyes as his ultimate service superior made certain his thanks had been publicly delivered.

Not to say the man hasn't picked up some small skill at politics.

"I'm not trying to denigrate what my people accomplished, and I'm not trying to poor mouth my own accomplishments. But that missile defense of theirs." He shook his head. "It's a bear, Tom. Really, really tough."

"Tell me about it!" Theisman snorted. "I know you haven't seen Lester's after-action report on Zanzibar yet, but he makes exactly the same point. In fact, he feels that the only reason he managed to carry through was the reloads he'd brought along for his superdreadnoughts. Basically, he ran them out of ammunition at extreme range, then closed in to almost single-drive missile range to get the best targeting solutions he could. And even then, he needed a superiority of three-to-one."

He shrugged.

"It's something we're going to have to deal with. The next-generation seekers are about ready to deploy—that should help some—and Shannon's already working on other solutions . . . in her copious free time." He and Giscard both chuckled at that one. "In the meantime, we're having to rethink our calculations over at the Bureau of Planning on the relative effectiveness of our units. At the moment, we're still confident we'll attain it, but it's beginning to look as if it will take longer than we'd anticipated."

Haven's reaction to Keyhole, which apparently was an issue for Tourville at Zanzibar too. Good thing he brought along all those munitions ships probably inspired by his last jaunt over a month away from any possible support.

"The thing that concerns me, Tom, is that our projections are based on what they've already shown us and what we've been able to extrapolate on that basis. But we didn't correctly extrapolate the improvement in their defensive capability. We knew it was going to get better, but I think it's safe to say none of us anticipated the actual margin of improvement. Just like none of us anticipated this dogfighting missile of theirs. What if they do the same thing to us with their MDMs?"

"That's a completely valid point," Theisman said gravely, "and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't had the occasional qualm myself. I think, though, that what we've already seen with Moriarty and the steady improvement in our own FTL communication and coordination ability, indicates we're still making up ground faster than we're losing it. And at the moment, it appears both we and the Manties are up against a fairly hard limit on the accuracy of full-ranged MDM exchanges. Theirs is better than ours, but with improvements like the new seekers, ours is getting better faster than theirs is."

He tipped back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest.

"I've got Linda and Op Research running every combat report through every analysis we can think of. We're charting the qualitative and quantitative improvements on both sides as accurately as we can, and we're constantly readjusting our projections. It's possible something will come along to overturn all our calculations. I don't think it will, and I hope it doesn't. But if it does, we ought to spot it in time to rethink both our options and our plans. And the bottom line is that I have no intention of committing the Navy to a decisive offensive operation unless I'm confident our calculations haven't been invalidated."

They have a rough estimated schedule for when they'll hit technological/unit effectiveness parity with Manticore, and so far at least they're still catching up faster than Manticore is moving ahead.

"And, with all due respect, Admiral Giscard," Alenka Borderwijk put in, "what you accomplished at Solon completely validated the Moriarty concept. We're moving ahead rapidly with deployment in other star systems, beginning with the most vital ones. On the basis of Solon, we believe our defensive doctrine and capabilities are sufficient to make it impossible for the Manties to accept the attritional losses major offensives of their own would entail."

"It certainly looks that way right now," Giscard agreed. "On the other hand, remember that at Solon we were up against only one task force, with only a single division of Invictuses. The missile defense of an entire Manty fleet would be much deeper and more resilient. I think you're right that Moriarty represents what's currently our best option for fixed system defenses, but it's going to have to be deployed in even greater depth than it was at Solon if it's going to stand up to a major Manty offensive."

Expansion of Moriarty deployments.

"And we're working on that. In addition, Shannon has the new system defense missiles almost ready to go into actual production. We still haven't been able to figure out a way to fit them into something an SD(P) can handle, but they ought to give the Manties fits when they run into them. That's the plan, anyway."

"So what you're saying is we ought to have a firm enough defensive capability to be able to take a few chances operating offensively," Giscard said.

"Within limits," Theisman agreed. "But only within limits. The one thing we can't afford is to shoot ourselves in the foot through sheer overconfidence. Even if," he grinned suddenly, "you did just thoroughly trounce 'the Salamander.'"

"Well," Giscard admitted with a grin of his own, "I have to admit it did feel good. I don't have anything personally against her, you understand, but as I'm sure Lester would agree, playing the part of her round-bottomed doll gets old in a hurry."

Haven is improving missile defense frantically too. For now they're getting ready to go back on the offensive.

"I've been going back over the combat reports—my own included—from the last round," Theisman said thoughtfully. "It's a bit early, but I'm inclined to think she's even better than White Haven was, tactically at least. I know he gave us conniptions, and God knows their damned 'Buttercup' was a fucking disaster, but Harrington is sneaky. There are times I don't think she's even bothered to read The Book, much less pay any attention to it. Look at that insane trick she pulled at Cerberus, for God's sake! And then what she did to Lester at Sidemore."

I'm not so sure that Honor's better, but I'll buy she's roughly as good.

"Oh, God," Giscard muttered in disgusted tones. "Just what Eloise and I needed—smutsies."

Theisman laughed. He shouldn't have, and he knew it, but smutsies—the modern heirs of the old pre-space paparazzi—had always been a particularly virulent fact of life in the People's Republic. In fact, they'd been almost a semi-official adjunct of the Office of Public Information's propagandists. They'd been used to titillate—and divert—the Mob with all sorts of intrusive, sensationalized stories about entertainment figures, supposed enemies of the People, and, especially, political leaders of opposition star nations. Some of the stories about Elizabeth III and her alleged . . . relations with her treecat, for example, had been decidedly over the top. Not to mention, he felt sure, anatomically impossible.

Unfortunately, the smutsies had survived the People's Republic's fall, and the new freedom of information and the press under the restored Constitution actually made them more intrusive, not less. So far, Giscard and President Pritchart had managed to keep their relationship more or less below the smutsies' radar horizon, and what the so-called "journalists" would do when they finally realized what they'd been missing formed the basis for the unofficial presidential couple's joint nightmares.

The downsides of Haven's newly restored freedom of the press.

Theisman reached out to reclaim the case, and lifted the rather plain-looking silver medal out of it. It hung on a ribbon of simple blue cloth, and he held it up to catch the light. It was the Congressional Cross, a medal which had been abandoned a hundred and eighty T-years ago when the Legislaturalists "amended" the Constitution out of existence. It had been replaced, officially at least, by the Order of Valor, awarded to "Heroes of the People" under the People's Republic. But it had been resurrected, along with the Constitution, and so far, only two of them had been awarded.

Well, three of them, now.

"This is goddamned ridiculous!" Giscard was genuinely angry, Theisman saw. "I won one small engagement against a single task force, half of which got away, whereas Jacques took out their entire damned building program! And Lieutenant Haldane gave his life to save the lives of almost three hundred of his fellow crewmen!"

Congress wants to give Giscard and Theisman their highest award, but both turn it down, unwilling to cheapen or politicize the thing by accepting it for relatively minor actions.

Honor stood in the Briarwood foyer, facing Illescue, and tasted his genuine remorse. It was overlaid with more than a little resentment at finding himself in this position, especially in front of her. And there was no question that he also suspected—or feared, at least—that her parents would hold him personally responsible. Yet for all that, it was remorse and professional responsibility which truly drove his emotions. It was unlikely most people would have believed that, given his stiff-backed, tight-jawed body language and expression. Honor, however, had no choice but to accept it.

She rather regretted that. After running the gauntlet of newsies outside Briarwood—despite Solomon Hayes' fall from grace, the story was still grist for the mills of a certain particularly repulsive subspecies of newsy—she'd been positively looking forward to removing large, painful, bloody chunks of Franz Illescue's hide. Now she couldn't do that. Not when it was so obvious to her, at least, that he truly meant his apology.

Empathic superpowers, the last word in speedy conflict resolution.

"No, Andrew. You are my armsman—you always will be. My perfect armsman. The man who's saved my life not once, but over and over. The man who helped save my sanity more than once. The man whose shoulder I've wept on, and who's covered my back for fifteen years. I love you, Andrew LaFollet. And I know you love me. And you're the one man I trust to protect my son. The one man I want to protect my son."

"My Lady—" His voice was hoarse, shaky, and he shook his head slowly, almost pleadingly.

"Yes, Andrew," she told him, sitting back in her chair again, answering the unspoken question she tasted in his emotions. "Yes, I do have another motive, and you've guessed what it is. I want you as safe as I can make you. I've lost Simon, Jamie, Robert, and Eddy. I don't want to lose you, too. I want to know you're alive. And if, God forbid, something happens and I'm killed in action, I want to know you're still here, still protecting my son for me, because I know no one else in this universe will do it as well as you will."

Honor sits down with LaFollet to explain that when her son is born, she wants him to leave her detail and take responsibility for his safety. Might want to have a guard on him even now, since the entire universe knows where the heir to Harrington Steading and Honor's duchy is.

"None of the intelligence available to us suggested any such possibility, so it was impossible to factor it into our plans. Apparently, our vehicle succeeded in taking out her bodyguard, exactly as we'd planned, and under circumstances which should have left him armed when she wasn't. And then, unfortunately, she shot him . . . with her finger."

Bardasano grimaced, and Detweiler actually chuckled, ever so slightly.

"So that's why the operation failed," she continued. "However, removing Harrington herself, while it would have been extremely satisfying personally to all of us on several levels, was never really the primary object of killing her. True, it would have been useful to deprive the Manties of one of their best naval commanders. And, equally true, the fact that she and Anton Zilwicki have become such good friends only adds to the reasons to want her dead. But what we were really after was killing her in a way which would convince the Manties generally, and Elizabeth Winton in particular, Haven had done it. And that, Albrecht, is exactly the conclusion which our Foreign Office agent informs us they all reached. After all, who else had a reason to want her killed?"

Shadowy Mesans (okay, Detweiler, Anismovna and Bardasano) discuss the failed attempt on Honor's life and that even with Honor's twigging onto the lone gunman, they still blame Haven.

"Well, as of our last reports," Anisimovna said. "Obviously, we're several weeks behind here, thanks to the communications lag, but both Nordbrandt and Westman seem to be working out well, each in his or her own way. Personally, I think Nordbrandt is more useful to us where Solly public opinion is concerned, but Westman's probably the more effective, in the long term.

"Politically, the reports coming out of their constitutional convention indicate Tonkovic is still digging in to resist annexation terms which would be acceptable to Manticore. She doesn't have any intention of actually killing the annexation, but she's so genuinely stupid she doesn't realize she's playing her fiddle while the house burns down above her. And reports from our people in Manticore all confirm that the combination of Nordbrandt's attacks and Tonkovic's obstructionism are contributing to a small but growing domestic resistance to annexing the Cluster after all."

Situation in Talbott, placing this part of the book roughly within that one.

"I know." Detweiler nodded. "And what about the propaganda offensive in the League?"

"There," Anisimovna admitted, "we're hitting some air pockets."

"Why?"

"Mostly because the Manties have replaced the complete incompetents High Ridge and Descroix had assigned to their embassy on Old Earth." Anisimovna grimaced. "I never would have picked Webster as an ambassador, but I have to admit that he's doing them proud. I suppose it has something to do with all the political experience he gained as First Space Lord. At any rate, he comes across as a very reassuring, solid, reliable, truthful fellow. Not only as a talking head on HD, either. Several of our sources tell us he comes across that way in one-on-one conversations with League officials, as well. At the same time, he—or someone on his staff, although all the indications are that he's the one behind it—has orchestrated a remarkably effective PR campaign.

"We're making progress, Albrecht. All the imagery of blood, explosions, and body parts coming out of Split are at least creating a widespread sense that someone in the Cluster objects to the annexation. And our own PR people tell us they're making some ground in convincing the Solly in the street to project Nordbrandt's activities onto all the Cluster's systems. But I'd be misleading you if I suggested Webster isn't doing some very successful damage control. In particular, he's succeeded in pointing out that actions like Nordbrandt's are those of a lunatic fringe, and that lunatics aren't exactly the best barometer for how the sane members of any society are reacting."

James Webster, First Space Lord before Caparelli and an old friend of Hamish's is now the ambassador to Earth, and so far he's doing a wonderful job of damage control on the terrorism in Talbott.

"Actually, Beth," Emily said tranquilly, "there is. We're married."

"You shock me." Elizabeth chuckled and leaned back in her chair, fanning herself with one hand. "Oh, how my trust in all three of you has been betrayed! Woe and lamentations. And so forth."

"Very funny," Emily said politely.

Elizabeth has a sense of humor, anyways.

"However," she continued, "the real devious reason I invited you three here and strong-armed your confession out of you, is that I'm wondering just how long you intend to wait before you publicly . . . regularize your situation?"

"We were waiting until Richard was able to confirm Hamish's interpretation of the legal complications," Honor said.

"And," Hamish admitted, "keeping quiet about it has sort of gotten to be a habit. I think we're all just a little bit nervous—no, a lot nervous—over how the public will react to this. Especially after High Ridge's smear campaign."

Since they trot out that defense earlier in the conversation, the legal matter seems resolved. Awkward to deny your having an affair and a bit over a year later you're getting married.

"Under some circumstances," Elizabeth continued just a bit more seriously, "this could have been a significant political liability. Not only is Hamish First Lord, but Willie is Prime Minister. Which, by the way, is the first time in the Star Kingdom's history two sibs have simultaneously held such important positions in a government. The idea that all of us were lying, whether we were or not, is going to present itself, and the Opposition would just love to pounce on it. At the moment, however, there is no effective Opposition. The only person who could put one together, really, is Cathy Montaigne, and given her own . . . irregular personal life—not to mention her basic personality—she'll be standing on top of the Parliament building toasting the brides and groom and leading choruses of obscene drinking songs in their honor.

"What I'm trying to say is that, politically speaking, there's no time like the present. I think you should go ahead and make your marriage public. Besides, I've consulted the Queen's Bench. They agree with Hamish's interpretation. And they also agree I have the authority as Queen to set aside Article One-Nineteen. For that matter, they tell me Admiral Caparelli could make the same decision 'for the good of the service' on the basis that the Crown can't afford to lose either of you at this particular time. So it's time to come out of the closet, you three."

And she'd like a very public 'joyous occasion' to offset Eighth Fleet's first ever defeat. We're, what, about nine months since the fall of the High Ridge Government and there's still no organized Opposition? Someone other than just Cathy should be coming out to lead the disgraced parties, or form new ones.

"What happened to you at Solon, Honor, and what the Peeps did to us at Zanzibar, have had a measurable impact on public morale. Events in Talbott aren't helping, either. At the moment, Admiral Sarnow seems to be getting on top of the situation in Silesia, but that butcher Nordbrandt is killing hundreds of people in Split. And what happened when the Peeps tried to assassinate you also has to be factored into the mix."

"My read is that the assassination attempt mainly pissed people off," Hamish said.

"It certainly did," Elizabeth agreed. "And if you think people were 'pissed off' here in the Star Kingdom, you don't even want to know how Grayson reacted! It was bad enough when they thought the Peeps had executed you, Honor—this is even worse, in a way. At the same time, though, all kinds of rumors are flying. In fairness to Lieutenant Meares and his family, I authorized the release of the information that he was acting under some form of compulsion. But the fact that we can't suggest how the compulsion was exerted is contributing to a climate of suspicion. Or fear, perhaps. After all, if the Peeps got to him, who else can they get to?

The situation on the homefront, and it seems Sarnow is doing okay in Silesia.

She handed the case to Emily, and Honor walked over so that Emily's life-support chair was between her and Hamish. Emily looked up at both of them, then looked back down and ran her finger across the raised, intertwined "B" and "S" crest of the firm which had been jewelers to the House of Winton for over three T-centuries.

She opened it, and Honor drew a deep breath as she saw the three rings nestled into the velvet interior. They were Grayson-style wedding bands, larger and heavier than the Manticoran norm, and exquisitely wrought, if not quite in the pure Grayson style. On Grayson, men's wedding rings were traditionally of yellow gold and women's of silver, but all three of these bands were made up of three interwoven strands, one each of yellow gold, white gold, and silver. They carried the Harrington Steading key on one side and the rampant White Haven stag on the other, and the flat-topped bezels bore the traditional circle of diamonds, each centered by a different semiprecious stone.

"I checked," Elizabeth said. "Honor, you were born in October, old-style. Hamish, you were born in March, and Emily was born in August. That makes your birthstones opal, jade, and sardonyx. So I had these made for you. They aren't quite Grayson, and they aren't quite Manticoran, just as the three of you no longer belong to just one of us."

Honor, Emily and Hamish's wedding rings. On Grayson men wear a gold wedding band and women wear silver.

It was a bit large, and she felt a flicker of surprise. Elizabeth had obviously taken pains to get this gift right, and it should have been easy for her to get Honor's ring size, given that Honor's father had the exact dimensions of her prosthetic hand. But then she felt Elizabeth's eyes on her and sensed the Queen's waiting watchfulness. She thought about it for a moment, then removed the ring from her left hand and tried it on her right.

It fit perfectly, and she held it up, looking past it at Elizabeth.

"If you want it resized, it won't be a problem, Honor," Elizabeth told her. "But I think I know you pretty well by now, and it occurred to me that you might want to wear it on your flesh-and-blood hand."

Another nice touch.

She'd never been one to wear much jewelry, but that ring looked perfect, and she smiled. Then she took it back off and handed it to Emily.

"Please, Emily," she said, holding out her hand as well. "On Grayson, the senior wife gives the wedding band to her junior. I know that, as Elizabeth says, we're not really Manticoran or Grayson anymore, but it would mean a lot to me."

Another Grayson tradition.

"The news is all over the Fleet by now." The chief of staff gestured at the ring glittering on Honor's right hand. "I was actually a bit surprised by how many people were surprised, if you know what I mean."

"And the reaction?" Honor asked.

"Ranges from mere approval to ecstatic, I'd say," Brigham told her.

"No concerns over One-Nineteen?"

"Of course not." Brigham chuckled again. "You know as well as I do that One-Nineteen is probably the most winked at of the Articles. Even if it weren't, nobody's going to suggest it applies to you and Earl White Haven. Or," Brigham cocked her head, "is he Steadholder Consort Harrington now?"

"Please!" Honor gave a deliberate shudder. "I can hardly wait for the Conclave of Steadholders to start in on this one! I seem to spend most of my time trying to find ways to give the real conservatives apoplexy."

"One can only hope it carries some of them off," Brigham said tartly, with all the fervor of the years she'd spent in the Grayson Space Navy.

"A most improper thought—with which I agree completely, however unofficially."

Fleet reactions to Honor's wedding, and probable Steadholder reactions. Seriously though, I think the Graysons will be ecstatic their two favorite Manticorans have gotten hitched.

"Imperator's going to be in yard hands for at least another month, Your Grace." Brigham's expression sobered. "Probably more, actually. None of the damage may've gotten through to the core hull, but her after graser mounts took a lot heavier beating than we thought before the yard survey. Agamemnon's going to be out of service even longer than that. Truscott Adams and Tisiphone should be returning sometime in the next three to six weeks."

Repair times after Solon.

"I spent three days at Admiralty House, Mercedes. The situation after Zanzibar is even worse than we'd thought. The Caliph is apparently considering withdrawing from the Alliance."

-snip-

"Good. Having said that, however," Honor continued, "there are some members of the Government—and a few people at Admiralty House, for that matter—who think we should actually be encouraging Zanzibar, and possibly Alizon, as well, to declare nonbelligerent status."

"They what?" Brigham blinked. "After all the trouble we went to to build the Alliance in the first place?"

"The situation was a bit different then," Honor pointed out. "We were on our own against the Peeps, and we were looking for strategic depth. Zanzibar and Alizon have both been net contributors to the Alliance—or would have been, if the need to rebuild both of them after McQueen's Operation Icarus hadn't cost so much—but what we really wanted them for was forward bases when everyone was still thinking in terms of system-by-system advances."

She shrugged.

"Strategic thinking's changed, as our own ops—and Tourville's attack on Zanzibar—demonstrate. Both sides are thinking in terms of deep strikes now, operating deep into 'enemy territory,' and simple strategic depth, unless you've got one heck of a lot of it, is looking less and less important. Not only that, but with Zanzibar effectively knocked out of the war for at least eight T-months to a T-year, the system's become a defensive obligation which offers no return. And Alizon, which also got hammered by Icarus, really only offers us the capacity to build a few dozen battlecruisers or lighter units at a time.

"So the new school of thought argues that freeing ourselves of the defensive commitments to protect relatively minor star systems would actually allow us to concentrate more strength in Home Fleet and here in Eighth Fleet. At the same time, assuming the Republic's willing to accept their neutrality and leave them alone, it gets them out of the line of fire. And the important allies at this moment are Grayson and the Andermani. We can protect Grayson more strongly if we can recall the forces currently tied down by commitments like Alizon, and the Andermani are effectively secure against direct attack simply because of how far away they are."

The new strategy where they cut loose the minor allies to concentrate fleet strength. Apparently Alizon has the shipyard capacity to build "a few dozen battlecruisers or lighter units" so presumably their local navy is at least that big. But right now, it's production of podnoughts that really counts.

"I think it's a rational, fresh approach to the problem. And I think that if the Republic is willing to accept and respect the future neutrality of current members of the Alliance, it would be very much in our interest to pursue the possibility. My biggest reservation is whether or not the Republic will accept anything of the sort, though."

"They've been trying to split the Alliance for decades," Brigham pointed out.

"Yes, they have. But one thing Eloise Pritchart and Thomas Theisman obviously aren't is stupid, which means they're as well aware as we are of how the strategic and operational realities have changed. So, if I were they, I'd be very tempted to reject any easy out for our allies. I'd insist on their surrender, rather than simply allowing them to say they're tired of playing and want to go home."

"Or," Brigham said slowly, "you might agree to allow them to become neutral, when what you really intend to do is sweep them right up as soon as we withdraw our units and leave them on their own."

Which is unlikely, but a possibility the Admiralty has to consider.

"We're going to try to keep them looking over their shoulders. Beginning next week—about the time we'd be doing it anyway, if we were following the cycle we established in Cutworm Two and Three—our destroyers are going to start scouting half a dozen of their systems. They'll do exactly what they've been doing as the preliminary for each of our earlier attacks. Except, of course, that there won't be any attacks."

"That's . . . deliciously nasty, Your Grace," Brigham said admiringly. "They'll have to assume we do plan to attack and react accordingly."

"Initially, at least. I suspect they're smart enough to wonder if that isn't exactly what we're doing, since they know they've hurt us badly. But I think you're right; they're going to have to honor the threat, at least the first time we do it to them. After that, they could change their minds."

"So if we do it to them two or three times while we aren't ready to attack," Brigham said, "get them accustomed to the idea that our scouts are just part of a strategy of bluffs, then when we are ready to attack—"

The plan to stall Haven, since Eighth Fleet won't be ready to get back into action for 6-8 weeks.

MacGuiness stood just inside the gymnasium hatch. Like Honor's original flagship, HMS Second Yeltsin was an Invictus-class superdreadnought. Honor had transferred her flag to her while Imperator was undergoing repairs, but although she and her staff been aboard Second Yeltsin for almost two weeks now, ever since her return from Manticore, the ship still didn't feel like "home."

Still, it wasn't exactly like camping out in a hut in the woods, either. Second Yeltsin, like Imperator, had been built as a flagship from the keel out, and several of her amenities reflected her flagship status, including the small, well-equipped private "flag gym" one deck down from the admiral's personal quarters. Honor had preferred to use the main gymnasium aboard Imperator, where she could take the pulse of the flagship's crew's morale and attitudes, but since Simon Mattingly's and Timothy Meares' deaths, Andrew LaFollet had put his foot down firmly. He simply could not guarantee her security with so many people so close together, and his feelings—and concern—had been so strong that this time Honor had offered barely token resistance. Even now, she could taste her personal armsman's focused attention as he stood behind MacGuiness, of all people, tautly wary of any sudden move on the other man's part.

Security adjustments after Tim Meares almost killed Honor. A new flagship, Second Yeltsin, if you don't remember the specified battle is Fearless II vs. Saladin/Thunder of God. So that's ironic. I also see they finally broke the iquality names.

"I'm sorry to break this up, Spencer. I think you're starting to get the hang of it." Hawke grinned; he'd only been studying coup de vitesse for ten T-years.

She kids, but I wonder if this isn't another effect of prolong, you can spend years learning a skill and still be the new guy to people who would have long since retired in a pre-prolong society.

"There's at least a suggestion, towards the end of their message, that they might be open to the idea of prisoner exchanges. You've been telling us all along that there's a big difference between the current régime and Pierre and his cutthroats. This certainly seems to bear that out. Of course, there are those—including the Queen—who argue that this is some sort of a trick, something designed to put us off guard, somehow, by a leopard who doesn't know how to change its spots. But whether they're right or not, I knew you'd want to know about Mike as soon as possible.

"According to their dispatch, the Peeps intend to allow personal messages from and to their POWs, strictly according to the Deneb Accords. Which is another refreshing change from StateSec or the Legislaturalists. I figured you'd probably want to start thinking about a message to her."

Manticore got the new prisoner lists, including the still-living Mike Henke. The Deneb Accords allow personal messages to and from POWs, even if the Peeps always ignored that part. Prichart is open to discussing prisoner exchanges, which the Peeps always refused because they have more people and Manticore has fewer and better trained. This may or may not be a good call for Haven, whether it's based on politics, military strategy or just a desire to do the right thing. And really, I suspect it's the latter simply because Theisman has been a POW and was distressed by the last regime's treatment of prisoners.

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-25 02:08pm

Simon_Jester wrote:
And then the final sixteen hundred missiles attacked TF 82's starships, most of them targeted on the two superdreadnoughts.
The desperate missile defense. 17,000 inbound missiles and they stop 12,500. The LACs catch three thousand missiles and die saving the big ships, and 1600 get through to 'true' hyper-capable starships.
OK, so clearly the upper limit of what TF 82 can handle in terms of salvo density is somewhere between 11000 and 17000 missiles, which is interesting because it's a fairly hard-and-fast figure. Also because as far as I can tell there have been no further significant advances in RMN antimissile capability from the time of At All Costs to the 'present' in the series.

So this gives us a good benchmark for what 'current' RMN ships of the latest classes can handle.

With 11,000 inbound, they had just under 400 leakers get through. When there were 17,000 missiles, 4600 scored hits, even if mostly on the LACs. So yes, I'd say that's pretty much their limit.

Mike Henke's Ajax has at least temporarily lost hyper and a lot of normal speed, and without their boat bays they can't evac like the crew of Necromancer. Apparently there are only life-pods enough for half the crew, on the theory that most of the crew can't be close enough to a life-pod to make a difference anyway.
For the more heavily-manned prewar ships, you would also expect massive crew casualties from any attack on the ship that left it "in a sinking condition," i.e. one where you'd need to man the lifepods. So it may be a normal practice to have only the minimum necessary number of escape pods. Especially since each escape pod requires you to sacrifice not only internal volume on the ship, but also hull surface area, which is precious.

Exactly as I understand it, and even without the pods they'll have pinnaces to carry off any extra. Unless the boat bay gets wrecked as happened here.

Oops? Sorry? Not sure how to respond to that, and they've apparently lost another 11 highly valuable SD(P)s. Operation Gobi was a smashing success for Haven.
Well, more of the partly completed SD(P)s in Manticore are being completed, but yeah, this is keeping the overall RMN fleet strength limited in a way that is very valuable to Haven.

Takes over a year, and closer to two to build an SD. Manticore's building speed is actually several months faster than Havens, but they have less building projects in place and only started laying new hulls when the war began, counting on the 'almost ready' reserve at Grendelsbane that went up in smoke. So really, they're losing SDs a lot faster than they can build them.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-07-26 09:13pm

Ahriman238 wrote:Takes over a year, and closer to two to build an SD. Manticore's building speed is actually several months faster than Havens, but they have less building projects in place and only started laying new hulls when the war began, counting on the 'almost ready' reserve at Grendelsbane that went up in smoke. So really, they're losing SDs a lot faster than they can build them.

I could have sworn that there was interrupted construction to be resumed in the Manticore Binary System...

Ahriman238 wrote:They have a rough estimated schedule for when they'll hit technological/unit effectiveness parity with Manticore, and so far at least they're still catching up faster than Manticore is moving ahead.

Well, they're right, except that Manticore is about to pull another superweapon out of their ass, because somehow they brought gravitic comm bandwidths up from "alphabetic flag signal" level in 1903 PD to "streaming video and missile guidance telemetry in fleet-scale naval engagements" in 1920 PD...

I'm not so sure that Honor's better, but I'll buy she's roughly as good.

White Haven is the classical tactician and strategist par excellence. He values all the things a good tactician and strategist should, he understands when to focus on single targets and when to split his forces, when to take risks and when to play it safe. And he is occasionally inspired to perform some great act of sneaky tactical cunning.

Honor performs such acts of cunning all the time. While she may or may not be as good at organizing and planning an operation "by the book" as White Haven and having everything done properly and effectively under those rules, she is the more creative strategist and therefore more alarming to the enemy.

Sort of like how Rommel was most alarming to the Allies not so much because he was a great general all around, but because his mastery of speed, decisiveness, and his ability to do unexpected things would throw Allied command off balance. Throwing someone off balance is a good way to make them overestimate you.

And she'd like a very public 'joyous occasion' to offset Eighth Fleet's first ever defeat. We're, what, about nine months since the fall of the High Ridge Government and there's still no organized Opposition? Someone other than just Cathy should be coming out to lead the disgraced parties, or form new ones.Well, Cathy's taking over the Liberal side of the coalition.

Descroix's disappearance leaves the Progressives a scattered mass of individual opportunists who might feel more secure kissing up to other parties rather than rebuilding their own power structure... plus, a fair number of senior Progressives other than Descroix are probably being prosecuted.

The Conservatives, because their power base is almost entirely in the Lords, are the ones most likely to survive as an organized body. But they are also the party most likely to fission under the twin shocks of resuming the war and (more importantly) the total collapse of the High Ridge-North Hollow political axis. Losing the North Hollow files and High Ridge's leadership breaks up the force that allowed the Conservatives to hold such solid party discipline over the past sixty or seventy years. And without that they are not a very credible political force, because I doubt that there's really single-minded agreement among the Conservatives' own ranks as to what they want and how they want to get it.

Plus, I bet a lot of the probable alternatives to High Ridge as party leaders of a Conservative faction are, again, subjects of criminal investigation. Which even if it doesn't boot them out of the Lords immediately, does make them non-credible as actual leaders of a party.

Fleet reactions to Honor's wedding, and probable Steadholder reactions. Seriously though, I think the Graysons will be ecstatic their two favorite Manticorans have gotten hitched.
And in a marriage format they probably thought only they in all the galaxy went in for, no less...

Also, we observe here that fraternization regulations are often "winked at" in Manticoran service. Huh.

The new strategy where they cut loose the minor allies to concentrate fleet strength. Apparently Alizon has the shipyard capacity to build "a few dozen battlecruisers or lighter units" so presumably their local navy is at least that big. But right now, it's production of podnoughts that really counts.
Although a BC(P) is still a ship of considerable and respectable force, in my opinion.

"I'm sorry to break this up, Spencer. I think you're starting to get the hang of it." Hawke grinned; he'd only been studying coup de vitesse for ten T-years.
She kids, but I wonder if this isn't another effect of prolong, you can spend years learning a skill and still be the new guy to people who would have long since retired in a pre-prolong society.

Oh, definitely. The "so new he squeaks" aspect may fade, but you're still competing with people who have forty, fifty, or potentially up to a century of experience at whatever you're doing.

And who are still very much in their mental and physical prime, so you can't use stamina to compensate for experience. This is even an issue in white collar work; older employees may have more experience but usually can't force themselves to work long hours on limited sleep...

Ahriman238 · Post by **Ahriman238** » 2014-07-31 09:30pm

At this point, I admit I'm stalling just a bit, because there are major spoilers for events in Torch of Freedom coming up, and rather inextricably linked to the plot of this book.

Edward Saganami-A class Heavy Cruiser

Mass: 393,000 tons
Dimensions: 569x69x57 meters
Max Acceleration: 592 G
Normal Acceleration: 474 G
Broadside: 14 missile tubes, 5 grasers, 10 counter missile tubes, 10 point defense
Chase: 3 missile tubes, 2 grasers, 6 counter missile tubes, 6 point defense
Number Built: unknown (at least 20)

The original Edward Saganami was a heavy cruiser they'd just started designing when war broke out, the old war in 1905. It went through multiple redesigns with input from Grayson and new systems developed until the launch of the first ship in 1908. The first flight of ships were all essentially prototypes that received extensive modification on the fly, using up most of the allotted space for upgrades. It wasn't until the second flight they had a production model to follow.

As originally built, they were the most advanced cruisers in space, with the latest compensators, ECM and stealth technology, extensive automation reducing crew sizes and even a new-fangled bow wall like on the cutting edge LACs. It seems a bit simple compared to the follow-ups but that's no fault of the class, and they're still more capable than many a ship still in active service.

The ill-fated Jessica Epps was a member of this class, the Saganamis are always named for Manticoran naval heroes.

Having had a hand in the design, Grayson built 46 of these ships, though they call theirs the Protector Adrian-class.

Edward Saganami-B-class Heavy Cruiser

Mass: 425,000 tons
Dimensions: unknown
Max Acceleration: unknown
Normal Acceleration: unknown
Broadside: 19 missile tubes, 10 grasers, unknown missile defense
Chase: 2 missile tubes, 4 grasers, unknown missile defense
Number Built: unknown

The Saganami-B cruisers were conceived at the very beginning of the peace and the Janacek Admiralty, but had to be sold as a "block upgrade" rather than it's own class despite it's considerably greater size and missile armament. The Bs also use more automation than the A, cutting crew size down to 385. The most major changes are the addition of off-bore missile launchers and the larger tubes to fire Mk. 14 extended-flight missiles. Where most missiles' standard accel is 42,500 Gs for three minutes, the Mk. 14's default accel is 46,000 Gs, making it pretty much the pinnacle of single-drive missiles as far as range goes. In theory, the ship could fire both broadsides at a target before or behind it, from beyond the enemy's effective attack range. In practice, the front and rear arcs only carry enough fire control links to manage 18 missiles at a time.

Most of the Bs follow the 'class' standard of naming ships after Manticoran naval heroes. The most famous of the class is an exception, however, HMS Gauntlet and her captain Michael Oversteegen participated in the Battle of Tiberian and the Liberation of Torch.

Edward Saganami-C-class Heavy Cruiser

Mass: 483,000 tons
Dimensions: unknown
Max Acceleration: 725 G
Normal Acceleration: 580 G
Broadside: 20 missile tubes, 8 grasers, unknown missile defense
Chase: 5 grasers, 3 lasers, unknown missile defense
Number Built: unknown (6 as of SoS/AAC, with more in construction)

The Saganami-C class perfects the missile combat paradigm of the B by stripping chase missiles to provide all the fire control links needed. The expanded missile tubes of the B are replaced with even larger tubes to fire Mk 16 dual-drive missiles, making the C a valuable MDM-capable asset. The latest compensators are even faster, more automation has led to a crew of 355. They also have a two-stage "buckler" bow wall that can cover an area a bit over twice the ship's size without closing the wedge or reducing accel and maneuvering. Distinctly made for missile combat, but also a tough nut at energy range with the walls and oversized grasers.

The original six Saganami-Cs were named for predatory animals, after that they resume the naval heroes theme. The most famous so far is the Nasty Kitty HMS Hexapuma, which was essential to the annexation of the Talbott Cluster.

Also note, someone once asked David Weber on a forum if Hexapuma could take on a superdreadnought circa 1905 (the start of the Haven War.) He said if they had only 1905 EW, absolutely. To elaborate, they'd shoot themselves dry of MDMs and effectively cripple the SD, maybe enough for a gutsy captain to close and finish her with beams. But it could happen, and there's surprisingly little difference between a Solly SD today and a Manty one fifteen years ago.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-07-31 11:51pm

Unless of course the Saganami-C has a full load of pods tractored to their hull. It can carry 40 pods tractored to the hull inside the wedge remember. Giving it 400 of the full up three stage missiles. Or... 320 three stagers and 40 Apollo control missiles. You can combine Apollo with purely lightspeed comms as well, those 320 missiles would only require 40 control links to command and would have access to the control missile's onboard computers, which are smarter.

Edit: And I believe that was before the Mark 16 Mod G was introduced. Which increased the yield of their missiles quite significantly. I believe it was stated up to what a Pre-War Capital Ship warhead was. Implying their modern capital missiles carry much more heavier warheads then they had pre-war.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-08-01 12:35am

I don't think a Saganami-C is Keyhole-II capable, though, because a Keyhole telemetry relay platform weighs about twenty thousand tons, which is a really big fraction of total mass budget for such a ship. And you need Keyhole to control Apollo missiles.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-08-01 02:02am

Simon_Jester wrote:I don't think a Saganami-C is Keyhole-II capable, though, because a Keyhole telemetry relay platform weighs about twenty thousand tons, which is a really big fraction of total mass budget for such a ship. And you need Keyhole to control Apollo missiles.

To control them via FTL, yes. But as seen in Mission of Honor the Apollo control missile still has it's RF links. So you can go Saganami-C -- Control Missile -- 8 Shipkillers, using the control missile to increase your capacity by 8. Thats how a formation of Saganami-Cs (and Nikes IIRC) were able to control enough missiles to kill that fleet of Solarian SDs. They just sat on a pile of pods and ripple fired off Apollo missile pods. If you want, I can provide quotes (admittedly from the ARC but I don't think that section changed from the ARC to the actual printed book).

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-08-01 02:50am

Waitaminute.

Oh. Sorry, I tend to get more than a little vague about events in, uh, Mission of Honor, A Rising Thunder, and Storm from the Shadows. Dunno why.

Well, yes, a Saganami-C can still control capital-sized MDMs. But there's really no good reason to use Apollo missiles for that, because the Apollo control missile has effectively no utility other than acting as an FTL relay for fire control telemetry. Without FTL transceivers to communicate with the control missile, you might as well just use the extra space it takes up to fire 25% or 50% more conventional MDMs.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-08-01 06:14am

Simon_Jester wrote:Waitaminute.

Oh. Sorry, I tend to get more than a little vague about events in, uh, Mission of Honor, A Rising Thunder, and Storm from the Shadows. Dunno why.

Well, yes, a Saganami-C can still control capital-sized MDMs. But there's really no good reason to use Apollo missiles for that, because the Apollo control missile has effectively no utility other than acting as an FTL relay for fire control telemetry. Without FTL transceivers to communicate with the control missile, you might as well just use the extra space it takes up to fire 25% or 50% more conventional MDMs.

It does have one. A single MDM pod full of Apollos only takes up a single control relay, not the 10 a full pod of Mark 23s.

The Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser massed four hundred and eighty thousand tons. It mounted twenty missile launchers in each broadside, and it had been designed to fire double broadsides at its enemies, then provided with a sixty percent redundancy in control links as a reserve against battle damage. That gave each of Aivars Terekhov's cruisers one hundred and twenty eight telemetry links, and each of those links was assigned to one Mark 23-E missile, which, in turn, controlled eight standard Mark 23s.

As I said, it does have one benefit. Your Saganami-C can only control 128 Mark 23 MDMs... or if you fired Apollos you can control 128 Apollo control missiles, which themselves control 1024 Mark 23s. Firing Apollo pods a Saganami-C can control 128 Pods/1024 Shipkillers, firing Pre-Apollo pods, you can only control 12 full pods, 120 shipkillers.

And wasn't it nice of BuWeaps to leave the Echo's sub-light telemetry links in place, too? he thought coldly, watching the icons of Sandra Crandall's ships sweeping closer and closer.

Echo meaning the Mark 23-E, otherwise known as the Apollo control missile.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-08-01 06:23am

Screwed up editing.... urgh. Clicked quote.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-08-01 01:30pm

VhenRa wrote:It does have one. A single MDM pod full of Apollos only takes up a single control relay, not the 10 a full pod of Mark 23s.

I'm skeptical of the idea that this SHOULD work, because it requires that each of the telemetry links operate at nine times as much bandwidth as it would otherwise. For most useful antenna designs I can think of, transmitting nine times as much information downrange to one missile isn't a lot easier.

And if telemetry bandwidth is irrelevant.

[Also, suppose having one telemetry link to a control missile that would then operate the other eight missiles in a master-slave setup actually DOES help compared to having nine telemetry links to nine individual missiles. Even with sublight communications. If so, frankly Shannon Foraker should have done it first. It's an obvious way to vastly multiply your ships' command and control ability. I had previously assume the reason that it wasn't done before is that it wouldn't help.]

Now, I no longer deny that this DOES work according to Weber. But, like the way that gravitic shielding somehow magically stops all relativistic particles cold while being largely ineffectual against much weaker attacks of electromagnetic radiation, I don't think it physically SHOULD work.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2014-08-01 08:46pm

Simon_Jester wrote:
VhenRa wrote:It does have one. A single MDM pod full of Apollos only takes up a single control relay, not the 10 a full pod of Mark 23s.
I'm skeptical of the idea that this SHOULD work, because it requires that each of the telemetry links operate at nine times as much bandwidth as it would otherwise. For most useful antenna designs I can think of, transmitting nine times as much information downrange to one missile isn't a lot easier.

As that should be even more of a problem with the FTL link given its known limitations, I'd say they found a way to deal with that. And yes, it is. It just takes 9 times as long. And that's assuming they're downloading instructions for the individual missiles instead of telling the Apollo missile 'this is the pan. Make the best of it'. The one thing I think you're overlooking is that the Apollo control missile is allegedly a lot 'smarter' than the regular attack missiles so having them even (possibly especially) outside (FTL or usual) telemetry range could make a world of difference.

VhenRa · Post by **VhenRa** » 2014-08-01 10:57pm

Batman wrote:
Simon_Jester wrote:
VhenRa wrote:It does have one. A single MDM pod full of Apollos only takes up a single control relay, not the 10 a full pod of Mark 23s.
I'm skeptical of the idea that this SHOULD work, because it requires that each of the telemetry links operate at nine times as much bandwidth as it would otherwise. For most useful antenna designs I can think of, transmitting nine times as much information downrange to one missile isn't a lot easier.
As that should be even more of a problem with the FTL link given its known limitations, I'd say they found a way to deal with that. And yes, it is. It just takes 9 times as long. And that's assuming they're downloading instructions for the individual missiles instead of telling the Apollo missile 'this is the pan. Make the best of it'. The one thing I think you're overlooking is that the Apollo control missile is allegedly a lot 'smarter' than the regular attack missiles so having them even (possibly especially) outside (FTL or usual) telemetry range could make a world of difference.

Mind you, they had one-way FTL usage for it as well. Using Ghost Rider drones to transmit FTL sensor pictures back to the ship and sending the correction to the missiles STL. And IIRC, captured data on Solarian EW procedures from the Battlecruisers.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-08-02 02:20am

Batman wrote:As that should be even more of a problem with the FTL link given its known limitations, I'd say they found a way to deal with that. And yes, it is. It just takes 9 times as long.

What are you talking about? There's no point even bothering with a control downlink to your missile unless you're using it to feed continuous updates on the target.

Now, in principle you could simply have the entire pod salvo of missiles slave itself to the control missile, tell the control missile where the target is, and let it relay those instructions to the normal missiles from each pod launch. But as I go into below, if that helped it should already be in play as a very obvious, cost-effective counter to the low accuracy of MDM fire at long range, and its depressing tendency to go after the wrong targets.

It might help, but it shouldn't help enough to offset the reduced salvo weight you get from only firing 2/3 as many missiles.

And that's assuming they're downloading instructions for the individual missiles instead of telling the Apollo missile 'this is the pan. Make the best of it'. The one thing I think you're overlooking is that the Apollo control missile is allegedly a lot 'smarter' than the regular attack missiles so having them even (possibly especially) outside (FTL or usual) telemetry range could make a world of difference.

Yes, but if it helped that much the Havenites really should already be doing it. They have a MASSIVE long-range accuracy problem and using a big ECCM/computer missile to analyze the Manticoran EW defense and see through it is one of the most obvious, logical ways to get around their disadvantages that I can imagine.

Now, that would actually have been interesting- if Haven rolls out their version of Apollo (control missiles with no FTL telemetry) and it helps in a concrete way... but is significantly outclassed by Apollo (with FTL telemetry).

eyl · Post by **eyl** » 2014-08-02 04:51am

[quote="Simon_JesterWhat are you talking about? There's no point even bothering with a control downlink to your missile unless you're using it to feed continuous updates on the target.

Now, in principle you could simply have the entire pod salvo of missiles slave itself to the control missile, tell the control missile where the target is, and let it relay those instructions to the normal missiles from each pod launch. But as I go into below, if that helped it should already be in play as a very obvious, cost-effective counter to the low accuracy of MDM fire at long range, and its depressing tendency to go after the wrong targets.[/quote]

It might be more complex than that. IIRC the main advantage of Apollo is that it allows continuous updates to counter enemy ECM even when the missiles are far from the ship. However, it's possible that the "counters" don't have to be tailored to each specific missile, but rather can be downloaded as a single package to Apollo which replicates it for the salvo it's controlling.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2014-08-02 03:32pm

Perhaps so. I don't feel that contradicts my point.

My point is that if sending eight MDMs plus a control missile with sublight telemetry relays confers a meaningful advantage over just firing 25-50% more missiles and saying "good luck baby" to all of them individually, Haven could already have been doing that and it would be a very silly oversight on their part to not have tried. It would have vastly simplified their command and control problem.

And they're already desperate to solve the command and control problem because they need overwhelming volume of fire to saturate RMN missile defenses, and their physical ability to coordinate such volume of fire is the big limiting factor there.

Terralthra · Post by **Terralthra** » 2014-08-02 08:52pm

Unless they couldn't miniaturize sufficient computer power into the control missile to justify it. It could have enough of a power demand that they can't make it work in a missile body, for example. Moriarty is the Havenite answer to MDM control problems, and it's the size of a cruiser.

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