Moderator: NecronLord
given that happened after the CMs were cut loose from shipboard control and thus the attack missiles were already pretty close to the Monican BCs I'm inclined to say just jamming. Given the range at which the Nasty Kitty opened fire I don't think a Mk16 could make it that far on a single drive.A238 wrote:Dazzlers, and was that a carefully timed drive transition or just the jamming?
Need less CLACs anyway. Its your own home system, you can base your LAC horde of doom out of things like stations and such.Ahriman238 wrote:
Home Fleet strength: 42 SD (an unknown number of them podnoughts) 16 CLAC, 12 BC, 36 cruisers, 32 DD. They have less carriers than Eighth Fleet, but are otherwise superior in numbers in keeping with the defensive mindset of honorverse navies.
Actually, yeah, that works out exactly.Batman wrote:Actually 15 'lost' missiles thanks to no crew to reclaim them in the feed queues for the 5 destroyed launchers would handily explain where they parked the additional 120 missiles-40 launchers, 3 missiles apiece preloaded into the ordinarily empty queues.
Maybe, the missiles disappear entirely for five seconds so the counter missiles lose lock, then they reappear but flickering, uncertain and terribly difficult to reacquire thanks to jamming. I suspect that five second gap of nothing was the missiles killing their drives then bringing up the jamming and the second stage drives at the same time.As for thisgiven that happened after the CMs were cut loose from shipboard control and thus the attack missiles were already pretty close to the Monican BCs I'm inclined to say just jamming. Given the range at which the Nasty Kitty opened fire I don't think a Mk16 could make it that far on a single drive.A238 wrote:Dazzlers, and was that a carefully timed drive transition or just the jamming?
True enough, they can and do. The carriers are more like the cap on how many LACs they can take through the Junction, like reinforcing Lynx or Trevor's Star. Actually, they apparently leave the borrowed carriers in Talbott for a while, on the logic that they can be more easily spared from the frontlines than podnoughts but are plenty for dealing with Verge pirates or future OFS shennanigans while they get each cluster world their own LAC horde.VhenRa wrote:Need less CLACs anyway. Its your own home system, you can base your LAC horde of doom out of things like stations and such.
Doesn't work out. The Manticoran DDMs were already in CM acquisition range. If they'd merely killed/burned out their first-stage drive they'd have disappeared minutes before. They're off the radar for all of five seconds which given the engagement range means they're already using the second drive (and have been for some time).Ahriman238 wrote:Maybe, the missiles disappear entirely for five seconds so the counter missiles lose lock, then they reappear but flickering, uncertain and terribly difficult to reacquire thanks to jamming. I suspect that five second gap of nothing was the missiles killing their drives then bringing up the jamming and the second stage drives at the same time.As for thisgiven that happened after the CMs were cut loose from shipboard control and thus the attack missiles were already pretty close to the Monican BCs I'm inclined to say just jamming. Given the range at which the Nasty Kitty opened fire I don't think a Mk16 could make it that far on a single drive.A238 wrote:Dazzlers, and was that a carefully timed drive transition or just the jamming?
That's a navigational error of roughly one part in seven hundred million, although since there are known "landmarks" in hyperspace, it may have been possible to get firm positional fixes while in hyperspace and thus reduce the true distance that had to be covered by dead reckoning.Ahriman238 wrote:Gotta allow for some margin of error on FTL jumps."Sorry, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Wright said. "I undershot a bit."
"Stop fishing for compliments, Toby," Terekhov said, never looking away from the astrogation plot. "Five hundred k-klicks off on a thirty-eight light-year jump? Sounds like a bull's-eye to me."
Eh, allow her the occasional brainfart, she's heading into a real combat zone for the first time in her life. That is, a combat zone where she and her captain haven't already worked out everything in advance so that the 'battle' takes on the character of an execution like the one in Nuncio.Bingo, but Helen, you already knew this.Her pulse, she knew, was quicker than usual, yet in almost too many ways, this felt like just another training sim. Which, she supposed, was the point of spending so much time in simulators in the first place.
Arguably, this is more sophisticated than tractoring the pods flush against the hull because it means the pods aren't limited by the geometry of little nuisances like "not jamming the pod up against a radar antenna hard enough to kink it." It's much better to have them a few kilometers away but still inside the wedge, in the large dead zone to ventral and dorsal of an impeller-wedge ship. That way they're concealed and protected by the wedge, but don't physically obscure any important bits of the ship that should have a clear view of the enemy.The flatback pods, or perhaps a transitional version since they aren't carrying these flush against the hull. Now instead of towing one pod for every tractor beam, each ship can tow as many pods as they have fire control links to fire. Which is a lot, particularly for the newer ships. Heck each destroyer can handle more pods than a BC could when they first started using them (which was 5-7).
Ignoring it, more like.Engineering of MDM power sources, and the realities of MDM combat. Negating the all-important issue of fire control....the point I was going to make is that they have an effectively unlimited powered attack range. They could fire the damned things from five or six light-hours out, accelerate the bastards up to speed, and then program the second stage drive not to kick in until the birds entered attack range of their targets. If they didn't punch the max velocity too high, they wouldn't suffer significant -particle-erosion degradation of their onboard sensor systems during even a very long ballistic flight component."
Also, a Solarian battlecruiser under emissions control and/or stealth (are they accelerating or not, I am unsure) can fly within eleven light-seconds, otherwise known as about 3.3 million kilometers, of a Manticoran recon drone before being detected.Terekhov's paranoia pays off, they detect the inbound Monican BCs,"She's right, Skipper," Naomi Kaplan said from AuxCon. She'd been studying the frustratingly inconclusive data herself. "And if that's what we've got here, Sir," she continued grimly, "whoever it is has got much better EW than any Monican unit ever had."
On the other hand, the SLN missile are capital-class or larger, with big damn warheads. They don't need to score many hits to take something the size of a destroyer or cruiser and break it in half like a stick.Technodyne's cutting edge Solly-tech missile pods. Only 8 birds to a pod, I see they added 500 Gs to missile accel and their pods are stealthy and difficult targets. Good. Not really competitive with Haven Sector navies in other ways though. And while I respect the pods are pretty much their only real chance of striking back, missile massacre is not a game you want to play with the Manties. Especially not when they brought half again as many pods as you did.
As Terekhov later puts it to a truly nasty piece of work, "Why is is that people like you always think you're more ruthless than people like me?"First time I've ever heard of dividing the counter missile kill zone into three, with different ships having responsibility for each zone, but it makes a degree of sense, especially considering the newer ships will have better sensors and sheer range on their counter missiles. Apparently improved rate of fire is part of the recent improvements too, which may combine with the greater range to explain why Manticore can usually get off more salvos of CMs against a given hostile salvo.
Honestly, a Saganami-C would probably win against a prewar Sultan even if both crews had equal skill levels, even without MDMs.And apparently a BC crewed by chimpanzees is a credible threat to a heavy cruiser, at least so one might think from Honor of the Queen. Of course, the Kitty isn't exactly your average CA, if Honor had something like it at Second Yeltsin....And they were battlecruisers, with all the armor and sheer toughness that implied.
Probably.
Broadly in keeping with normal acceleration figures for extreme range missile fire.Apparently a Mk 16 MDM does 46,000 Gs in long-distance mode.
Also, an Indefatigable mounts enough point defense lasers to 'deal with' a thirty-missile salvo of old-school missiles: maybe take a few hits, but not the kind of major damage they can suffer from ten or fifteen missiles hitting the target without being shot down.The Monicans aren't nearly as tough on defense, but even after that hit Typhoon (all the BCs were renamed for powerful storms) is still in the fight.This time Janko Horster did swear.
Typhoon's shipboard sensors were less affected by the Manties' infernal jammers than the counter-missiles' seekers had been, but it was painfully obvious they hadn't been unaffected. They fired late, and their solutions were poor. An Indefatigable-class battlecruiser's point defense clusters should have been more than equal to a salvo that size, but she stopped only fourteen of them. The other sixteen got through.
This suggests that these particular Indefatigables are in fact designed to be able to shoot down fairly large missile salvoes that detonate at laser-head engagement ranges... which to me suggests they are a post-laser head design, not something 100 years old or whatever. A battlecruiser that old would probably simply not have the weapons mounts to carry that many laser clusters, unless it was extensively refitted.
Prior to the invention of the laser head, shooting down missiles with point defense lasers was easy, so you didn't need very many of them.
RMN ships were doing more or less that at the Battle of Blackbird. The catch is that point defense lasers aren't going to be very good at engaging crossing targets, because the uncertainty in their position is higher and the missiles' wedges will block the laser shots from certain angles.Much less effect out of the second salvo. Interesting that the BCs are networked enough to share targeting data for PD clusters, eve if it is less effective.
Whereas a countermissile will kill an incoming missile from any angle, any way, as long as it gets within a wedge's width of the target.
Honestly, in their shoes I'd be tempted to bull straight into beam range, which would probably have paid off very well. Playing Irish Stand-Down with missiles against the Manties just isn't safe. And this is a rare case where Manticoran ships can't out-accelerate their opponents.Still outranged, just a bit by the Manties, who all fire as soon as the Monicans begin turning.
Then again, that would mean the battlecruisers can't put as much fire on target in those minutes, and probably wouldn't score any missile hits themselves.
Again, I can't imagine why this should be the case. It's an arbitrary restriction and the League should be just as capable of building a quick-firing missile launcher as Manticore.Not like there was a ton you, Horster, could have done about that. Except maybe find and destroy the recon platform sitting right on top of you. 35 second cycle time for Solly BC missile launchers, an eternity compared to the fire rates of Haven Sector navies.
Ahriman238 wrote:Can't say the man lacks nerve. He'd do it too. If you doubt, Van Dort asks if he's bluffing and he explains that he isn't. Fortunately, the Monicans back down.
Hear hear. Its one of my favorite lines too.White Haven wrote:That line from Terekhov is one of my favorite, and one I've had occasion to borrow on one or two memorable tabletop occasions.
It amuses me that you attribute to the commodore the lines "we will be forward-deploying assets... as long as everyone stays put... there will be no conflict."Ahriman238 wrote:HM: Not at all, if the Manticorans are smart. The business in Monica was a slap in the face to the League, but we're prepared to let things slide considering the wrongdoing that went on. The important thing for Manticore right now is not to provoke the League further. We will shortly be forward-deploying assets to protect New Tuscany, the one Talbott Cluster world that elected not to join their so-called "Star Kingdom," from Manticoran aggression. As long as everyone stays put and does nothing rash, there will be no conflict.
As noted before, I've always doubted that the grav drivers should make that much difference, since the delta-v they grant is trivial compared to the delta-v granted by the missile's main engine burn. It probably wouldn't actually cost much performance to omit the things. Especially not with an MDM pod; you lose about one or two percent of the missile's powered range from rest by giving up the grav drivers. It's more like five percent for a single-drive missile.A238: You're not concerned at all? What about the salvo advantage given by missile pods, does that concern you even a little bit?
HM: Oh they use missile pods, do they? How.... quaint. The League Navy abandoned missile pods decades ago. Modern point defense renders them quite useless, you see. A pod-deployed missile lacks the initial velocity of a ship-launched one, so either they come in two salvos, quite insufficient to overwhelm out point defense, or they step down their ship-launched salvo, giving us quite a bit of extra tracking time. Missile pods and the navies that deploy them do not concern me at all.
To be fair, without Solly-grade or Manticoran ECM this would probably be true. Also, frankly, if you don't have a highly specific and exotic system like Keyhole... you really can't control that many missiles effectively against someone whose EW performance is at least within shouting distance of yours.A238: Well, they have advanced grav-drivers, and quite a lot of pods. The newest generation of superdreadnoughts in the Haven Sector all have hollow after halves filled with pods they kick out the back on rails. They can launch thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of missiles at just a few targets. Are you worried now?
HM: Not in the least. They can't possibly have fire-control links for so many missiles, and dumb-fired missiles aren't even interesting targets for our missile defenses...
Since Manticore had been keeping their possession of the FTL comm a military secret for quite some time, this is remotely credible... but it's a brick-stupid thing of the SLN.A238: You won't make it to beam range is what I'm trying to say. Listen, Manticore recently deployed an FTL comm relay missile that gives them unprece-
HM: Now that is outright impossible! The faster-than-light comm is only a few years old, produced by our own Technodyne Industries, and it is a massive emplacement. It could never fit on a missile, nor could the ability to exchange a few grav-pulses a minute can't possibly be used to control missiles in any meaningful way.
That's one of the Solarian issues, I think, tied into the fact that they've experienced such a long peace.HM: Now my good man, you begin to verge on sounding delusional. Faster than light communications has been a scientific Holy Grail chased after for millennia. I assure you, it's a Solarian invention and if anyone had come up with one sooner, the entire galaxy would know of it.
To be fair, it seems like without (again) fundamental breakthroughs in power density that only Manticore has achieved (and Haven emulated) in secret while pretending nothing out of the ordinary is going on... this would be true.A238: .... Fine. You've at least heard of Manticore and Haven building missiles with multiple drives, yes? Are you truly unconcerned by the thought of huge pod-based missile salvos firing on you from 30 million klicks away?
HM: I have been privy to the reports on the wars of the Haven Sector, yes. I dare say I know as much about them as any officer in the League. There were some spurious reports of so called "MDMs" which I assure you were taken quite seriously, and carefully investigated by Solarian technical experts. They determined that such a missile would be unmanageably huge and impossible to power. Much less the more outlandish reports of missiles with three drives.
I'm not sure where you got that figure from.HM: Why, certainly! Ever since the widespread introduction of the laser head, another Solarian innovation by the way, We've realized that missile defense had to get a whole lot tougher. Aegis seriously upgrades counter missile fire control links, while designating two or more missile tubes for defense. At need, those tubes can fire canisters of counter missiles, allowing even a light cruiser to destroy thirty or more inbound missiles before they've even reach laser cluster range.
McMuttonchops is actually right according to the recent tech bible. It's just that the League didn't take the idea and run with it for a few decades because the earliest laser head designs were kind of pathetic.A238: I see. That's actually more impressive then I expected. So much so that I'm letting the laser head thing slide. What effect do you anticipate this new wrinkle will have on space combat?
Again, in his defense, I'm pretty sure he'd be right against any missile hardware that existed anywhere in the galaxy prior to 1910 PD, including Manticoran systems. Ships with missile defenses adequate to the threat (i.e. not People's Republic of Haven ships, but probably including SLN vessels as well as RMN ones) can fend off enough missile fire that an enemy ship of comparable tonnage can shoot itself dry without ever inflicting decisive damage.HM: Eventually, other navies will realize that missile combat with the League is pointless. There missiles cannot touch us, while ours may inflict some damage until we close to beam range, and do not popular entertainment deceive you, that is where all decisive combat takes place.
A238: Not so much anymore...
It's interesting to speculate about whether 100-200 prewar LACs could handle a prewar dreadnought. Their combined missile broadside would be, oh, about 1200-2400 missiles, which might well be enough to achieve defense saturation with a single launch. The dreadnought could only get off a few hundred missiles in the time it takes that broadside to arrive... then again, that's a few missiles per LAC, and I'm not sure a prewar LAC has much chance of survival against even three or four capital-class missiles given the lack of countermissile launchers and papery or nonexistent sidewalls.A238: I don't suppose you'd believe me if I said that Manticore and Haven used large swarms of LACs to pull down even capital ships?
HM: That would depend, how large were these "swarms?"
A238: An LAC wing is usually a hundred craft, some of these battles have involved six or more wings.
HM: In that case, I would believe you. Though I'll note it speaks poorly to the quality of both navies' "capital ships."
See above.A238: In fact, LAC wings have proven so effective, they've been employing dreadnought and larger scaled hulls as FTL LAC carriers.
HM: Have they? Hmph. Most unorthodox. Well, if they wish to waste so much tonnage shuttling around LACs, I for one am in no hurry to explain the error of their ways to them. About the only use for LACs against SLN ships will be to exhaust our missile magazines, and I doubt they'd be willing to try it.
In fairness, Commodore McMuttonchops has a point, it sounds kind of ridiculous when stated flatly like that.A238: Well, they have the new inertial compensators, inspired by Grayson designs, that give every ship pretty much half-again the accel/decel of older, and your, ships.
HM: Not the most preposterous claim you've made today, but merely.... improbable. The technology behind inertial compensators is very well understood, and has undergone centuries of tweaking and tinkering. I can't imagine how anyone could produce such a breakthrough.
A238: It was the Graysons, they tried a different design, one nobody else expected to work, but actually was quite a bit more efficient. Manticoran R&D kind of took the concept and ran with it.
HM: Oh that is rich, not just a single planet with a smaller total GDP than the R&D budget directed solely to compensators outdid us, but a planet of backwards, anti-technology religious fundamentalists? I think we're done here. Thank you for a most.... entertaining afternoon, Mr. Ahriman.
The main problem I see is not that McMuttonchops (a fairly representative SLN officer, in my opinion) is wrong about these technical arguments. Most of them are fairly credible if you don't know that Manticore, like Mesa, has a massive scientific research establishment that's been working in secret for decades or more to devise technologies unknown and unimagined by the rest of the galaxy.A238: .... You haven't paid attention to a word I've said, and you really have no concept how thoroughly screwed the first Solarian ships to confront the Royal Manticoran Navy are, do you?
HM: Well, that's your opinion, and we all know what they say about opinions.
A238: We certainly do...
Manticore is using the same pods for everyone where possible. System defense, towed, and podlayers. Flatpack pods are designed both to be extremely stealthy and to have onboard mini-fusion plants, presumably both for the onboard tractor beam and to kindle the missile's fusion plants. Significant here is that Henke flushed all her pods and set them to auto-fire at nearby hostiles some time ago, before working on abandoning ship.Current-generation Manticoran missile pods were extraordinarily stealthy. Against a powered-down missile, active radar detection range was around a million kilometers, give or take. But then, missiles weren't designed to be as stealthy as the pods that carried them, because any attack missile was going to be picked up and tracked on passives with ludicrous ease thanks to the glaring signature of its impeller wedge. Which meant stealth wasn't going to help it very much.
But a missile pod was something else entirely. Especially a pod like the current-generation Manticoran "flatpack" pods with their on-board fusion plants. They'd been designed to be deployed in the system-defense role, as well as in ship-to-ship combat. After all, BuWeaps had decided, it made more sense to build a single pod with the features for both, as long as neither function was compromised. It hugely simplified production and reduced expense, which was a not insignificant consideration in an era of MDM combat.
The Hermes buoy, which basically has an FTL comm and a conventional comm, and translates one signal to the other. In this case acting as a crude approximation of Keyhole II, giving Letting Henke control the missile pods and feed them data from the Ghost Rider platforms.Along with the missile pods, Ajax had deployed half a dozen Hermes buoys—communications platforms equipped with FTL grav-pulse receivers and light-speed communications lasers. Ghost Rider recon platforms had kept the Havenites under close observation, reporting in near real-time to Ajax, and Ajax had used her own FTL com and the Hermes buoys to feed continuous updates to her waiting missile pods.
Any sort of precise fire control over such a jury rigged control link, with its limited bandwidth and cobbled-up target selection, was impossible, of course. But it was good enough to ensure that each of those missiles had been fed the emissions signatures of the battlecruisers it was supposed to attack. Accuracy might be poor, compared to a standard missile engagement, and the EW platforms and penetration aids were far less effective without proper shipboard updates, but the range was also incredibly short, which gave the defense no time to react. Despite any shortcomings, that huge salvo's accuracy was far greater than anything Haven could possibly have anticipated . . . and not one of its missiles wasted itself against a ship of the wall.
Henke's last gesture of defiance kills two Havenite BCs, and cripples/wrecks four more.Two of Bogey Two's eight battlecruisers died spectacularly, vanishing into blinding fireballs with every single man and woman of their crews as the demonic bomb-pumped lasers stabbed through them again and again and again. The other six survived, but four of them were little more than broken and battered wrecks, wedges down, coasting onward while shocked and stunned survivors fought their way through the wreckage, searching frantically for other survivors in the ruin.
The admiral's jaw muscles ridged as his battlecruisers died. Then he twisted around to glare at his tac officer.
"Open fire!" he snapped.
Just a surprisingly emotional moment, given Theisman's history as a helpless witness to atrocities committed against POWs, first at Blackbird base, then with Ransom, and that he spent some time as a very well-treated prisoner of Honor and Grayson before being repatriated."And I also appreciate the fact that I've already been allowed to communicate with the senior POWs. Who, I hasten to add, have confirmed everything you and President Pritchart have told me. Duchess Harrington's been assuring everyone that your attitude towards captured personnel isn't exactly the same as Cordelia Ransom's or Oscar Saint-Just's. While I won't pretend I wouldn't rather be sitting down to dinner at Cosmo's in Landing just now instead of enjoying your hospitality, I'm glad to see just how right she was."
"Thank you." Theisman looked away for a moment and cleared his throat again, harder this time, before he looked back at her. "Thank you," he repeated. "That means a lot to me—knowing Lady Harrington's said that, I mean. Especially given the circumstances the only two times we've actually met."
"No one in the Star Kingdom blames you for what those Masadan lunatics did on Blackbird, Mr. Secretary. And we remember who told Honor—Duchess Harrington, I mean—about what was happening. And who testified for the prosecution at the trials." She shook her head. "That took more than just integrity, Sir."
Theisman invites Mike to an upscale dinner before she's packed off to the remarkably comfortable gulag. He is of course very apologetic for Admiral Redmount's immediate rage at losing most of his BCs to a "helpless abandoning ship.""Admiral Redmont and I have already met, Mr. Secretary," Michelle told him.
"So I understand." Theisman smiled thinly. "On the other hand, a little more time has passed since then, and Admiral Redmont and I have had the opportunity to . . . discuss his actions at Solon."
"Sir, Admiral Redmont didn't—"
"I didn't say I didn't understand what happened, Admiral," Theisman told her. "And, if we're going to be honest, I might very well have reacted the same way if I'd thought you'd deliberately waited to abandon ship until you knew I'd sailed into your ambush. But if we're going to keep a handle on atrocities and counter-atrocities, then anytime something like this comes along, it needs to be addressed squarely. I don't doubt that Admiral Redmont acted correctly after he'd picked up your surviving people. And I don't doubt that the two of you handled yourselves with proper professional courtesy. I hope, however, that you'll accept my invitation and give all of us an opportunity to discuss the incident and our reactions to it in a less . . . charged atmosphere, shall we say?"
Well, Hades leaps directly to mind, they were pretty content there to let the prisoners organize themselves and not post guards everywhere. But yes, instead of a warden or commandant they get a liaison officer.Captain Adelbert Bouvier was the Republican Navy's designated "liaison officer" to its prisoner-of-war camps here on the Republic's capital world. Frankly, she found the Havenites' arrangements a bit . . . peculiar. Technically, Bouvier should probably have been considered Camp Charlie-Seven's commanding officer, although he wasn't called that. He was the Havenite officer with command authority over the camp and its inhabitants, at any rate, but he and his superiors seemed prepared to allow Camp Charlie to function with a sort of semi-autonomy which had astounded Michelle when she first encountered it.
Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of another example of a star nation which didn't bother to post its own personnel on the ground, as it were, to at least keep an eye on a camp full of prisoners of war, all of whom could be presumed to be trained military personnel with a distinct interest in being elsewhere. On the other hand, it wasn't exactly as if they needed to put a lot of boots on the ground here at Charlie-Seven.
Similar to Hades, they don't really need that much security when the prison is a remote island, with enough hidden ground remotes and spy-sats on it that they'll know if anyone tries to leave in plenty of time to pick them up before they reach the mainland. They airlift food and other supplies in, presumably under heavy security, and the prisoners have a comm to call their liaison officer. And that's that, nearly perfect prison security without being oppressive.Camp Charlie-Seven occupied the entirety of a relatively small, somewhat chilly island in the planet of Haven's Vaillancourt Sea. It was almost eight hundred kilometers to the nearest body of land in any direction, which provided what Michelle had to concede was a reasonably effective moat. And if there were no guards actually on the ground, everyone in the camp knew their island was under permanent, round-the-clock surveillance by dedicated satellites and ground-based remote sensors. Even assuming that anyone on the island had been able to cobble up some sort of boat that actually stood a chance of crossing to the mainland across all that water, the sensor nets and satellites would have detected the attempt to launch said boat quickly, and Republican Marines could be on the ground on the island within fifteen minutes, if they really needed to.
With that sort of security available, Secretary of War Theisman had opted to allow his prisoners to manage their own affairs, subject to a sort of distant oversight by officers like Captain Bouvier, as long as they kept things running relatively smoothly. It might be an unheard-of technique, but it appeared to be an effective one, and it was about as far as it was possible to get from the horror stories Michelle Henke heard from Manticorans unfortunate enough to fall into Havenite custody in the previous war.
Two new Haven characters, and officers' drug resistance.Theisman's other two dinner guests—Vice Admiral Linda Trenis and Rear Admiral Victor Lewis—had also been pleasant enough dinner companions, although she'd found herself feeling definitely grateful for Theisman's promise the meal's beverages would be truth-drug-free. She was reasonably confident the Navy's anti-drug protocols would have worked, but even without that, Trenis and Lewis—especially Lewis—would have made formidable interrogators if Theisman hadn't quietly reminded them this was a social occasion. Given the fact that Trenis commanded the Republican Navy's Bureau of Planning, which made her the equivalent of Second Space Lord Patricia Givens, the commander of the Manticoran Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence, and that Lewis commanded the Office of Operational Research, the Bureau of Planning's primary analysis agency, their ability to put even small fragments together shouldn't have surprised her, she supposed. It was still impressive, though. In fact, pleasant though the evening had been, she'd come to the conclusion that the Republic of Haven's senior command staff had a depressingly high level of general competence.
9,000 POWs on Camp C7, storm-proof shelters.She managed to stay busy here on the island—with a total prisoner population of almost nine thousand, there was always something that needed her attention, despite Turner's efficiency—which kept boredom at bay most days. And Charlie-Seven's island home was far enough north to provide the occasional interesting storm, now that this hemisphere's autumn was well advanced. Some of the POWs, she knew, found those storms less than reassuring. She wasn't one of them, however. The camp's sturdy, storm-tight buildings stood up to the howling wind without any particular difficulty, and the surf on the island's rocky southern beaches was truly spectacular. In fact, she found the local storms invigorating, although McGregor insisted they were mere zephyrs compared to a real Gryphon storm.
Size of the SLN wall of battle, 2100 SD. With massive reserves. Also, a reasonable character disagrees with Terekhov's haring off, even if she doesn't yet know all the details.The President paused, crossed her legs, and sat back, head cocked to one side, obviously giving Michelle time to get past the worst of her initial shock and absorb the implications of what she'd just said, and Michelle forced herself not to swallow as those implications went through her. She couldn't imagine what sort of evidence chain could have sent any reasonably sane captain in the Royal Manticoran Navy into what could so readily turn into an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the most powerful navy in the history of mankind.
Well, the biggest, at any rate, a stubborn little voice said in the back of her mind. ONI's reports all insist the SLN still doesn't have the new compensators, FTL coms, decent missile pods or pod-layers, or—especially—MDMs. But what they do have is something like twenty-one hundred superdreadnoughts in active commission, a reserve fleet at least two or three times that size, the biggest industrial and technological base in existence . . . and something like two thousand fully developed star systems. Plus, of course, the entire Verge to exploit at will.
Once more, Manticore can go wild and win all the battles they want at first, the League is something like 18 Havens in population and far more in industrial output, with a healthy R&D establishment. Long-term there really isn't a lot of hope against the League.She was well aware that some of the RMN's more . . . enthusiastic tactical thinkers had been arguing for years that the advances in military technology produced by the Star Kingdom's half-century and more of arms race and open warfare with Haven had rendered the entire League Navy hopelessly obsolete. Personally, she was less confident than the majority of those enthusiasts that Manticore's clear advantages in many areas translated into advantages in all areas. Even so, she was entirely confident that any Manticoran task force or fleet could handily polish off any comparable Solarian force, probably without even breaking a sweat. Unlike those enthusiasts, however, she strongly doubted (to put it mildly) that all of Manticore's tactical advantages put together could possibly overcome the enormous strategic disadvantage of the difference between the Manticoran and Solarian populations and resource and industrial bases.
There's nothing wrong with the Sollies' general tech base, either. We probably have a slight edge overall, thanks to the way the war's pressurized every area of R&D for the last fifty years or so, but if we do, it's fingernail-thin. And once their navy wakes up and smells the coffee, they've got lots of people to put to work closing the gap. Not to mention the building capacity, if they ever get organized. For that matter, some of the League members' system defense forces have been a lot more innovative than the SLN's senior officer corps for as long as anyone can remember. There's no telling what some of them have been up to, or how quickly any little surprises one of them may have developed for us could be gotten into general service once we bloodied the SLN's nose a time or three. And some of the SDFs are damned near as big—or bigger—in their own right than our entire Navy was before Uncle Roger started his buildup.
Terekhov doesn't seem to be taking the loss of so many men in Monica well. This part takes place before they go home, just before Khumalo arrived to relieve them at Monica.The face in Aivars Terekhov's mirror was thinner and gaunter than the one he remembered. In fact, it reminded him of the one he'd seen when he'd been repatriated to Manticore as a returning prisoner-of-war. The last few months might not have been as bad as that nightmare experience, but they—and especially the six weeks since leaving Montana—had still left their imprint, and his blue eyes searched their own reflection as if seeking some omen of the future.
Losses at Monica, and they're keeping Vigilant's doctor."First," she said, "there's the sick report. Lieutenant Sarkozy still has twenty-seven patients in sickbay, but she expects to discharge three more of them today. That will be . . . eight of our own people and twelve more from Warlock and Aria who've returned to duty so far. And she says that Lajos should be returning to duty in the next two or three days."
-snip-
And Lajos was a hell of a lot luckier than the seventy-four members of the ship's company who'd been killed in action, Terekhov thought grimly.
The civilian part of Eroica station has been very unfortunate in terms of unverifiable emergencies the last couple of weeks."Do you think there's any truth to Tyler's 'medical emergency' claims, Sir?" Lewis' question pulled Terekhov back up out of his thoughts and he gave himself a mental shake, followed by a physical shake of his head.
"I won't completely rule out the possibility. If it is a genuine emergency, though, it's a very conveniently timed one, don't you think?"
"Yes, Sir." Lewis rubbed the tip of her nose for a moment, then shrugged. "The only thing that struck me as just a bit odd about it is that he's waited this long to trot it out."
"Well, he's already used the running-out-of-food argument, and the life-support-emergency claim, and the damaged-power-systems claim, Ginger," Nagchaudhuri pointed out. "That old fairytale about the boy that cried wolf comes to mind now."
"That it does," Terekhov agreed. "On the other hand, this one is a bit different in that we can't verify—or disprove—his claims as easily as we did the others."
Nagchaudhuri nodded, and Terekhov busied himself spreading butter across a warm muffin while he pondered.
It had been relatively simple to dispose of most of the Monicans' so-called emergencies. Although Hexapuma's shipboard sensors had been severely mauled, Terekhov still had more than enough highly capable remote reconnaissance platforms to keep an eye on everything happening in the Monica System. Those same platforms had been able to monitor the surviving components of Eroica Station and disprove Tyler's claims about things like power spikes or atmospheric leaks caused by collateral damage from the bombardment of the station's military component. But claims of disease among the station's inhabitants were something else.
Fancy that."So Tyler turned down your invitation to offer his sick citizens free medical care, did he?" Bernardus Van Dort said dryly. He and Terekhov sat in the captain's briefing room later that morning, chairs tipped back, nursing cups of coffee, and Terekhov snorted.
Terkhov and Van Dort's relationship has grown slightly more complicated, for all that Van Dort understands ruthlessness.Personally, Van Dort had come to the conclusion that Terekhov probably wouldn't nuke the civilian portion of the station no matter what happened. Or not any longer, at least. Given his range and accuracy advantage, he was far more likely to settle for picking off Bourmont's cruisers and destroyers, instead. In fact, Van Dort thought, the threat against Eroica's civilians had actually become the way Terekhov was avoiding the necessity of killing any more of the Monican Navy's uniformed personnel, since it prevented Bourmont from pushing him into doing just that.
Of course it does, Bernardus, the businessman-turned-statesman told himself. And one reason you want it to be true is that you don't really want to think your friend Aivars really would kill all of those civilians.
Not a lot of professional liability laws in the Cluster."We did let the pregnant workers from Eroica return to the planet," he said, and made a face. "I can't imagine what these people were thinking about letting them work in an environment like that in the first place! Every extra-atmospheric work contract in the Star Kingdom contains specific provisions to prevent exposing fetuses to the sorts of radiation hazards aboard a station like that."
"Rembrandt, too," Van Dort agreed. "But a lot of the star nations out here, especially the poorer ones, don't seem to think they have that luxury."
"Luxury!" Terekhov snorted. "You mean they aren't going to enforce proper liability laws against their local employers, don't you? After all, insurance drives up overhead, right? And if they aren't going to be liable—legally, at least—anyway, then why should any of them worry about a little thing like what happens to their workers or their workers' children?"
Van Dort contented himself with a nod of agreement, although Terekhov's vehemence worried him. It wasn't because he disagreed with anything the captain had just said, but the raw anger—and the contempt—glittering in Terekhov's blue eyes was a far cry from the Manticoran's normal demeanor of cool self-control. His anger was one more indication of the pressure he was under, and Van Dort didn't even want to think about what would happen if Aivars Terekhov suddenly crumbled.
I'd figure more like twenty, and that's including the onboard dedicated antimissile launchers. But then, I don't remember hard figures for anyone's countermissile and antiship missile diameters, which is the main factor in play.Ahriman238 wrote:Aegis stopping thirty missiles is somewhere between an asspull and an eyeball estimate. Essentially how many counter missiles I guess they could fit in two cannisters launched out regular missile tubes.
That seems a tad bit unfair to Redmount. On the other hand, Henke is probably one of the highest-ranking Manticoran prisoner of war (though I imagine they bagged a few admirals of varying ranks with Thunderbolt). And she is very highly placed in their political circles. Since Haven's real strategic objective is to just convince Manticore to stop fighting and resume serious negotiations, that matters.Theisman invites Mike to an upscale dinner before she's packed off to the remarkably comfortable gulag. He is of course very apologetic for Admiral Redmount's immediate rage at losing most of his BCs to a "helpless abandoning ship."
On the other hand, Hades was a prison planet, not a prison camp...Well, Hades leaps directly to mind, they were pretty content there to let the prisoners organize themselves and not post guards everywhere. But yes, instead of a warden or commandant they get a liaison officer.Right off the top of her head, she couldn't think of another example of a star nation which didn't bother to post its own personnel on the ground, as it were, to at least keep an eye on a camp full of prisoners of war, all of whom could be presumed to be trained military personnel with a distinct interest in being elsewhere. On the other hand, it wasn't exactly as if they needed to put a lot of boots on the ground here at Charlie-Seven.
Surfing is probably discouraged. Sailboarding... right out.9,000 POWs on Camp C7, storm-proof shelters.She managed to stay busy here on the island—with a total prisoner population of almost nine thousand, there was always something that needed her attention, despite Turner's efficiency—which kept boredom at bay most days. And Charlie-Seven's island home was far enough north to provide the occasional interesting storm, now that this hemisphere's autumn was well advanced. Some of the POWs, she knew, found those storms less than reassuring. She wasn't one of them, however. The camp's sturdy, storm-tight buildings stood up to the howling wind without any particular difficulty, and the surf on the island's rocky southern beaches was truly spectacular. In fact, she found the local storms invigorating, although McGregor insisted they were mere zephyrs compared to a real Gryphon storm.
At least, not as long as it stays basically unified and its economy isn't totally chopped up.Once more, Manticore can go wild and win all the battles they want at first, the League is something like 18 Havens in population and far more in industrial output, with a healthy R&D establishment. Long-term there really isn't a lot of hope against the League.
Also, remember my comments about how Terekhov is like Picard except for the part where instead of constant low-level crankiness, he saves it up and lets it out in bursts? This is what happens when he gets his mad on for too long at a time.Van Dort contented himself with a nod of agreement, although Terekhov's vehemence worried him. It wasn't because he disagreed with anything the captain had just said, but the raw anger—and the contempt—glittering in Terekhov's blue eyes was a far cry from the Manticoran's normal demeanor of cool self-control. His anger was one more indication of the pressure he was under, and Van Dort didn't even want to think about what would happen if Aivars Terekhov suddenly crumbled.
And I think the upcoming (In story series) first and second Battle of Manticore demonstrates this as it shows what a fleet with Ferrets acting as forward defenses for missiles where the missiles just get whittle down. After all if the reason you only get two shots at an incoming missile swarm is that's how long the engagement time is before the missiles go boom, what about something like a Ferret who gets one or two shots as the missiles head into their formation and another one or two as they pass on by to the primary targets of the fleet beyond.Terralthra wrote:Except that fire control limits were very quickly a problem with SD(P) salvoes, one that Manticore only really solved, and it wasn't by adding more control links on the ship. Pods fire from behind the ship, so they don't blind sensors as directly as missiles fired broadside. Canisters fired out of broadside missile tubes do.
What Weber is essentially saying is that CMs suffer from the same problems as SD(P) salvoes, only even more so, since they're dumber, have poorer sensors, require a better targeting solution than laser-head missiles, and the salvoes fire more frequently. Keyhole platforms designed for CM-tenders could help ameliorate that problem, but at the point where you're designing detachable platforms to manage your missile defense, maybe you're better off with a detachable platforms like LACs, which can help screen you against the 3M and do other things.
You used to get more shots at incoming missiles back before MDMs. Now with MDMs and their higher closing velocities... well, its fairly obvious. With a single-stage, from rest, your missile peaks out around 0.28c. A full 3 stages of low-acceleration MDM however... peaks out around 0.84c. Its screaming into your PD envelope at 3 times the velocity, you have much much less time to get a lock, fire, cycle, fire, ect ect.Mr Bean wrote:And I think the upcoming (In story series) first and second Battle of Manticore demonstrates this as it shows what a fleet with Ferrets acting as forward defenses for missiles where the missiles just get whittle down. After all if the reason you only get two shots at an incoming missile swarm is that's how long the engagement time is before the missiles go boom, what about something like a Ferret who gets one or two shots as the missiles head into their formation and another one or two as they pass on by to the primary targets of the fleet beyond.Terralthra wrote:Except that fire control limits were very quickly a problem with SD(P) salvoes, one that Manticore only really solved, and it wasn't by adding more control links on the ship. Pods fire from behind the ship, so they don't blind sensors as directly as missiles fired broadside. Canisters fired out of broadside missile tubes do.
What Weber is essentially saying is that CMs suffer from the same problems as SD(P) salvoes, only even more so, since they're dumber, have poorer sensors, require a better targeting solution than laser-head missiles, and the salvoes fire more frequently. Keyhole platforms designed for CM-tenders could help ameliorate that problem, but at the point where you're designing detachable platforms to manage your missile defense, maybe you're better off with a detachable platforms like LACs, which can help screen you against the 3M and do other things.
Actually... there's nothing stopping the countermissile canister from being fired, the ship accelerating for ten seconds, and then triggering the countermissile drives on a delayed activation.Terralthra wrote:Except that fire control limits were very quickly a problem with SD(P) salvoes, one that Manticore only really solved, and it wasn't by adding more control links on the ship. Pods fire from behind the ship, so they don't blind sensors as directly as missiles fired broadside. Canisters fired out of broadside missile tubes do.
Well, one Keyhole-type platform can be about the size of one LAC, whereas meaningfully improving the defensive effectiveness of a capital ship by escorting it with LACs would require many LACs.What Weber is essentially saying is that CMs suffer from the same problems as SD(P) salvoes, only even more so, since they're dumber, have poorer sensors, require a better targeting solution than laser-head missiles, and the salvoes fire more frequently. Keyhole platforms designed for CM-tenders could help ameliorate that problem, but at the point where you're designing detachable platforms to manage your missile defense, maybe you're better off with a detachable platforms like LACs, which can help screen you against the 3M and do other things.
Having LACs that fire barrages of countermissiles into the incoming missile salvo work very well. Note that they cannot engage the missiles with countermissiles after the enemy salvo passes them, though- because MDMs and even single-drive missiles have a closing velocity so high that a countermissile will burn out before it catches up with them.Mr Bean wrote:And I think the upcoming (In story series) first and second Battle of Manticore demonstrates this as it shows what a fleet with Ferrets acting as forward defenses for missiles where the missiles just get whittle down. After all if the reason you only get two shots at an incoming missile swarm is that's how long the engagement time is before the missiles go boom, what about something like a Ferret who gets one or two shots as the missiles head into their formation and another one or two as they pass on by to the primary targets of the fleet beyond.
This is true and is probably the real reason Aegis doesn't have any significant effect against MDM fire, while Havenite defensive systems designed using at best the same level of raw technological proficiency do.VhenRa wrote:You used to get more shots at incoming missiles back before MDMs. Now with MDMs and their higher closing velocities... well, its fairly obvious. With a single-stage, from rest, your missile peaks out around 0.28c. A full 3 stages of low-acceleration MDM however... peaks out around 0.84c. Its screaming into your PD envelope at 3 times the velocity, you have much much less time to get a lock, fire, cycle, fire, ect ect.
