STORM FROM THE SHADOWS – snippet 51:
The display in front of Adenauer blossomed suddenly with icons as the first missile pod's Apollo faithfully reported what its brood could see, now that their eyes had been opened. The light codes of three hostile superdreadnoughts, screened by three light cruisers and a quartet of destroyers, burned crisp and clear, and for a heartbeat, the tactical officer did absolutely nothing. She simply sat there, gazing at the display, her face expressionless. But Michelle had come to know Adenauer better, especially over the last six days. She knew the commander was operating almost in fugue state. She wasn't actually even looking at the plot. She was simply . . . absorbing it. And then, suddenly, her hands came to life on her console.
The missiles in the attack salvo had been preloaded with dozens of possible attack and EW profiles. Now Adenauer's flying fingers transmitted a series of commands which selected from the menu of preprogrammed options. One command designated the superdreadnoughts as the attack missiles' targets. Another told the Dazzlers and Dragons Teeth seeded into the salvo when to bring their EW systems up, and in what sequence. A third told the attack missiles when to bring up their final drive stages and what penetration profile to adopt when they hit the enemy force's missile-defense envelope. And a fourth told the Mark 23-Es when and how they should take over and restructure her commands if the enemy suddenly did something outside the parameters of her chosen attack patterns.
Entering those commands took her twenty-five seconds, in which the attack missiles traveled another 3,451,000 kilometers. It took just under four seconds for her commands to reach from Achilles to the Apollos. It took another twelve seconds for her instructions to be receipted, triple-checked, and confirmed by the Apollo AIs while the shrouds on the attack missiles were jettisoned. Forty-five seconds after the first pod's missiles had jettisoned their shrouds, the follow-on salvo opened its eyes, looked ahead, and saw its targets, still two and a quarter million kilometers in front of it. They were 4.4 light-minutes from Achilles . . . but their targeting orders were less than sixty seconds old, and the computers which had further refined and analyzed the reports from the first pod's Apollo were those of a superdreadnought, not a missile, however capable.
The simulated targets' fire control had only a relatively imprecise idea of where to look for the attack missiles before their third-stage drives came suddenly on-line. They'd still been so far out when they shut down for the ballistic leg of their flight that the defenders' onboard sensors hadn't been able to fully localize them. The target ships had gotten enough to predict their positions to within only a few percentage points of error, but at those velocities, and on such an enormous "battlefield," even tiny uncertainties made precise targeting impossible. And precise targeting was exactly what was necessary for a counter-missile to hit an attack missile at extended range.
The defenders saw the Mark 23s clearly when the attack missiles' final stages came suddenly and abruptly to life, but by then it was already too late. There was no time for any long-range counter-missile launch, and even the short-range CMs had rushed targeting solutions. Worse, the EW platforms supporting the attack came on-line at the worst possible moment for the defenders. The counter-missiles' rudimentary sensors were totally outclassed, and there was no time for missile-defense officers to analyze the Manticoran EW patterns. Point defense clusters blazed desperately in a last-ditch effort to stop the MDMs hurtling in on the superdreadnoughts, but there were too many of them, they were closing too quickly, and the ballistic approach had robbed the defenders of too much tracking time. Many of the Mark 23s were destroyed short of target, but not enough.
The imagery on Adenauer's plot froze abruptly as the attack missiles and their Apollos slammed into their targets, were picked off by the defenses, or self-destructed at the end of their programmed runs. For an instant or two, the plot simply stayed that way. But then it came abruptly back to life once more. Just as a single pod had preceded the attack wave, another single pod followed in its wake. Its missiles had jettisoned their shrouds at the same moment the attack missiles executed their final runs, and Michelle watched in something very like disbelief, even now, as the results of the initial strike reached Achilles in less than five seconds.
One of the superdreadnoughts was obviously gone. Her wedge was down, she was streaming atmosphere and shedding debris, and the transponders of her crew's escape pods burned clear and sharp on the plot. One of her sisters was clearly in serious trouble, as well. From her impeller signature, she'd taken massive damage to her forward ring, and her emission signature showed heavy damage to the active sensors necessary for effective close-ranged missile-defense. The third superdreadnought appeared to have gotten off more lightly, but even she showed evidence of significant damage, and a second, equally massive attack wave was already tearing down on her.
My God, Michelle thought quietly. My God, it really works. It not only works, but I'll bet we've still only begun to scratch the surface of what this means. Hemphill told me it would be a force multiplier, and, Jesus, was she right!
She watched the second salvo bearing down on its victims, and even though it was only a simulation, she shivered at the thought of what it would be like to know that wave of destruction was coming.
Lord, if Haven knew about this, they'd be begging for a peace treaty! she thought shakenly.
She remembered something White Haven had said after Operation Buttercup, the offensive which had driven Oscar Saint-Just's People's Republic to its knees. "It made me feel . . . dirty. Like I was drowning baby chicks," he'd said, and for the first time, she fully understood what he'd meant.
It will be interesting to see what doctrine Weber has the Peeps/Mesans adopt to combat Apollo.
I wonder if you can jam the gravity communications systems?
Do we know the exact date of Michelle’s transfer to Talbott Cluster? When would she get an information about the Battle of Manticore?
What about generating a strong gravity pulse? Essentially throwing out so much distortion that the original pulse is lost. As far as I can tell, there aren’t separate gravity frequencies since the Havenites are picking up the pulses. They just can read or generate such a signalling system. If the don’t care, they should be able to throw out so much crap that the original RMN signals get lost. I wonder if that Would that play merry hell with the ship’s wedges?
The gravity pulse communication thing has always been a magic wand. Of course, so is artificial gravity in the first place.
Perhaps you can blow out the gravity transceiver with somesort of gravity beam…
The gravlance shall rise from the dead. And, as also should have been said if the Invincible SLN (8^)).
#1, I suspect the Peeps are going to ‘combat’ Apollo by signing a peace treaty. The Sollies will make a few tries at overwhelming Apollo fleets with numbers before they realize that it’s nearly suicidal (because it’s not just that the SLN lacks Apollo, they lack MDMs, too). And at that point who knows? The SLN won’t engage in fleet actions against the Alliance wall of battle if they can avoid it after a few fleets have been wiped out by the RMN in one-sided battles, at least not until they think they’ve come up with some sort of equalizer.
The fastest massive force multiplier the SLN could come up with is probably missile pods with MDMs, either using RMN-style tractor-equipped pods or RHN-style donkeys to tow massive numbers of pods. With enough ships, towing enough pods, it would actually be possible to fight an Alliance fleet; without MDMs, it should usually be possible for the Alliance to run if the numbers are too overwhelming. And odds are they’ll be able to do this much more quickly than building their own podlayers.
@7
The Apollo equipped ships need only to stand off outside the Hyper Limit and bomb the hell out of any fleet with impunity. If said fleet can actually survive the bombardment then the Manticore untis simply need to hop into hyper.
The only way your strategy would work would be by forcing the Manties to defend an objective and literally attack it with hundreds, maybe even thousands of SDs and be willing to sacrifice a good percentage of them to do it.
There are any number of things that the Sollies could do; given enough time and an effectively unattackable home base (think the US in WW II), they can come up with an overwhelming amount of material and manpower.
The thing that’s missing from this is that the Sollies aren’t a unified country like the US in WW II; they’re a loose confederation which isn’t going to pull together once the mass of people in the core worlds gets their attention forcibly dragged to what’s been going on for a while with Frontier Security.
And then Mesa is talking about the “end game”. That almost certainly involves coming out from behind the curtain and declaring themselves the Rulers of the Universe. That’s going to go over big as well.
So, yeah, it’s possible the Sollies can overwhelm Manticore with an unstoppable tidal wave of sacrificial ships. Politically it’s not likely.
John Roth
Iggy, with the current tech balance, the SLN can’t fight the RMN effectively, even with its huge numbers edge. It’s likely that the only thing that would keep 8th Fleet, err, Home Fleet from destroying the entire SLN if it attacked Manticore en masse would be lack of missiles. They absolutely need MDMs to be able to fight at all.
And the fastest way to get that capability is by building MDM pods designed to be towed in huge numbers (i.e. by equipping them with tractors ala the Alliance flat-packs, or building tractor platforms like Haven’s donkeys). Granted, it’s not going to give them anything like technological parity. But it will mean that when they can set up overwhelming numerical superiority, they can win some battles.
Hmm. Did you really mean to posit that the Haven Navy (adapted to carry lots and lots of missles into combat) might be adapted to haul around thousands of Apollo missle pods which would be controlled by the Manticore Navy (adapted to control lots and lots of missles in combat)? Because that’s what it sounded like.
Dang. I knew I misspelled missiles, but I could quite put my finger on it before hitting the send button.
Towing pods via a ships on-board tractors (ala both sides in the first Havenite war) won’t give you enough missiles to fight SDPs. The SLN, which has no podlayers (whether SD(P)s or BC(P)s), and no prospect of getting them any time soon (the MWW has posted over at Baen’s Bar that even a wartime crash development program would be unlikely to get its first SD(P) out of the yards in six years), absolutely needs a way to allow its warships to fire lots of MDMs.
Largely because both sides still didn’t have all that many SDPs, both Haven and Manticore deployed new technologies in At All Costs to allow warships to tow far more missile pods than they could previously.
Haven used a platform they called a ‘donkey’ which was just a tractor multiplier; it was towed by one of the warships tractor, but could tow several missile pods (or another layer or two of donkeys). Manticore designed a new missile pod with a built-in tractor. Either approach allows an SD to tow hundreds of pods — a significant fraction of what a Medusa-A can carry internally.
Getting MDMs is far more important to the SLN than getting Apollo (and far easier; building an MDM is a pretty straightforward exercise if you don’t mind building really big missiles), because you can compensate for lack of accuracy just by firing a lot more missiles. You can’t compensate for lack of range, at least not on the scale of a single-drive missile vs. a three-drive missile.
If there is a way to combat Apollo you can bet only Manticore Knows it, but reading between the lines in At All Costs I don’t believe there is as yet.
I think there are four ways to combat Apollo; the first two require MDMs to start with
1. Get Apollo or something similar yourself
2. Get a big enough edge in numbers that you can fire lots of inaccurate missiles instead of a smaller number of accurate missiles
3. Find some way of forcing a short-range engagement where Apollo’s advantages are mitigated
4. Shoot the officer who suggests going up against someone who has Apollo
I like option #4.
I stole it from Lois McMaster Bujold; it’s one of the methods of attacking a defended wormhole junction in the Vorkosigan universe.
Good series!!!
@John Roth
Sorry, but your arguments are at least at a very core point totaly wrong.
The industrial base of the SL is NOT secure. It is in reality very very vulnerable.
The SLN can’t hinder an RMN-Fleet from reaching any given system in the SL.
And once there the technological advantages enable the RMN to trash it.
With Beowulf as primary target secured the RMN has literally everything in the core under controll.
Ofcourse if you’re a corrupt SLN officer, you could easily Eridani every Manticore allied system while having a good chance of having some part of the League survive…
I expect that some of the system defense fleets have some nasty advanced tech that could be unpleasant for all comers.
End game… SL pushed into untenable position, very very limited possible action choices… Hmmm…
What happens if the Erdani Edict gets tossed out right about then?
Perhaps if the Manties + Haven do manage a stupendous, utterly thorough, and vastly *shocking* butt-kicking, one very possible response from OFS (if not the SL in general) could be “Oh crap! We’re all going to die under the iron bootheels of those horrible people if we don’t stop them *somehow*! So screw the Erdani Edict!” Or, pehaps some variation of “Our home systems *can’t* be taken over by these barbarians! Saving true civilization outweighs everything else – they must be destroyed root & branch!”
Or the response is justified in a manner similar to the one the US used in the attacks on Japan in WWII – The standard method would be too costly in lives, quickest way to end it, very regrettable, but it won’t be *our* people who take the most damage… (Yes, I know there are a lot of other factors too, but simplifying for sort-of-brevity…)
And if the *Sollies* do it, who’s going to call them on it? They have consistently been inplied throughout the series as the ‘enforcers’ of the edict…
Even with massively inferior armaments, the SLN (particularly the corrupt/dirty OFS) isn’t going to be willing to just give up, even if they get a serious hammering – out of either sheer panic or the Solly “1st world” arrogance factor, or OFS management fear of falling into the hands of the folks that they have been oppressing if nothing else.
How big a death toll are you going to get from ‘accidentally’ crashing a SD going at a fair percentage of c into s heavily populated planet?
Then there’s the ‘big lie’ method – “Bombard the planet? Oh my no, so sorry, it was a spaceship accident…”
Part of me is just very, very suspicious about all the ‘extra precautions to avoid planetary strikes’ detailed in the first few snippets – Made my antenna twitch a lot.
Of course, I could be utterly wrong too. Wouldn’t be the first time either – Guess I’ll just have to wait, then read and see!
I tend to agree that one way or another there will be some planetry bombardments sooner or later
One way is for mesa in league with OFS and corrupt SLN to bomb a SL planet maybe an expenable planet on the shell and somehow pin the blame on the manties that would then open the door to retalition
The next war is going to see billions not millions die…
@Dave (comments 8, 10 & 14)
MDMs do not combat Apollo. As Honor demonstrated in the battle of Manticore, the ability to maintain active control of Apollo birds after ballistic flight proves that Apollo has a range far beyond any conventional MDM. We know (from statements in AAC) that prior to Apollo, 50 million klicks was the effective maximum range for MDMs. Honor’s two salvos were at 70 million clicks (Chin) and 150 million klicks (Tourville). And at the end run against Tourville, 20 out of 60 got through against the defences of 68 damaged SD(P)s
Also, positing simple developments from known Manticoran technology.
1) Flat pack pods should be able to be carried externally by all Alliance ships, not only SD(P)s. We know that the first reference to flat-pack pods was on Andermani ships, and these were not ships of the wall. Unlike the old-style pods, flat pack pods attached to the hull will be within any ship’s wedge. And flat pack pods can hold Apollo birds, without any need to refit the ships.
2) To maintain the tractor beam for extended (i.e. months) deployment, there might have to be an external power source, but the description of Forraker’s donkeys indicates that broadcast power is a mature technology, so the power for the tractors could be supplied by ship’s power, if necessary.
2) According to Weber’s infodump, Keyhole (not specifically Keyhole 2) is a tool to control massive salvos. Keyhole 2 is necessary to contain the FTL technology. Since all Manticoran/Grayson ships have FTL technology, it is merely an engineering task to add Apollo control circuitry to the internal FTL equipment of any Manticoran/Grayson ship. (Andermani status unknown) They won’t be able to control massive salvos, but the distance advantage I pointed out earlier, combined with the difficulties in detecting ballistic birds negate much of the need for massive salvos except in the context of fleet battles.
3) If any light ship can carry 20 or 30 Apollo pods on it’s hull, and control at least half a dozen of these pods in a single salvo, then a single ship should be able to give 2 or 3 Solly SDs a sufficiently heavy nudge from, say, 100 million klicks, that the Sollies are unlikely to want to come any closer to find out whether the ships have any more of the missiles or not.
4) In a system-defence role, it should also be possible to ship a Keyhole 2 platform to any Alliance, or Alliance controlled, system (Weber tells us it’s not much larger than a LAC). Base a light ship which has been refitted with Apollo control in the system, and supply Apollo system defence pods. You should have a fairly effective system-defence capability capable of sending large salvos. Not as effective as the full-blown defence planned for Manticore, but sufficient to take out the sort of fleets that OFS or the SLN would be likely to send, given their contempt for the “barbarians”.
I never said MDMs countered Apollo. I said MDMs + truly massive numerical superiority can give at least give some ability to fight back, because you can match the range, albeit at a tremendous cost in accuracy.
Also remember that the demonstration salvo against Tourville was largely a bluff; Honor was using a Hermes buoy to extend range beyond what she would normally have, and she could not have controlled a salvo heavy enough to destroy a ship of the wall that way.
@25…
Apollo bird are one thing… but a boat has to be Keyhole II to control them… a process that is so extensive that it is easier to built new boats with it than to retrofit old ones for it… Hence the reason that the Manties were more pissed about the personnel losses to home fleet and third fleet than to actualy ships they were in… Most of them were on the chopping block anyway… Only the SD(p) which were all Keyhole I would be refitted anyway… All the PrePod SDs were just targets more or less…
As for stuffing Apollo, you need to understand the vulnerability of the weapon system… Its the Apollo missle itself… Guarantee as soon as Shannon Foraker gets solid data to work through she’ll figure out how the Manties are doing Apollo and how to track the Apollo missile and how to send a nasty low yield nuke counter missile (fired from ship baord missile tubes not CM batteries) right at them as part of a modified tripple ripple… Even that would be a challenge becuase of the near real time reaction of the Apollo system but its something…
Bottom line… Until someone has a way to stop Apollo the Manties have an overwhelming capability advantage with a lack of material support… It is that lack which will become painfully obvious and horribly exposed at the end of this very novel…
and thats all I have to say about that!
The “Hermes buoy” was only to relay the voice communication. She was controlling the missiles directly via Keyhole2.
ps. The warning shot against Tourville was no bluff. It’s clear that both sides correctly understood that.
David Weber has said straight out over at Baen’s Bar that she was controlling the missiles via the Hermes buoy, and as such, it was essentially a bluff; she needed to close considerably before she could attack effectively. Not that she couldn’t have destroyed his fleet anyway, but he would have gotten some shots in, and may have been able to attack the Sphynx yards first.
What?! That’s not in the book at all. Nor does it make sense. Why would the buoy be a helpful intermediate? She can already talk to the Apollo missile directly, using the same technology as the buoy.
Not, of course, that the author can’t say something that doesn’t make sense. That’s perfectly possible.
My guess here is that somebody asked him “if they can do that, then why don’t they do this….” and he didn’t want to have them be able to do that so he came up with this buoy control idea as a rationalization for why it could only work in Manticore orbit. But that’s totally a retcon. Otherwise the comments in the book about some part of Honor really hoping Tourville will reject her terms so she can blow him up don’t really make sense, now do they?
OK, I found this:
The ranges at which Honor fired in the Battle of Manticore — up to eight light-minutes against Tourville and 75,000,000 km against Chin — were both outside the maximum reception range Haven’s intelligence types had assumed the control birds would possess. In fact, in Tourville’s case, the range was outside Apollo’s effective reception range; Honor used a Hermes buoy, with its much greater reception range, and the inner-system FTL recon platforms, to coordinate the “demonstration attack” on Second Fleet. In many respects, that attack was essentially a bluff, although I deliberately didn’t say so in the book, since at the moment I’m rather looking forward to allowing the reader to fully appreciate Tourville’s reaction when he finds out that it was in a later scene. Honor didn’t begin to have the available bandwidth to coordinate full-scale missile attacks at that range, so she deliberately restricted her “demonstration” to a number of missiles she did have the bandwidth to control through her jury rigged telemetry set up.
========
So he’s saying he needed to use a relay because the buoy has more range. Eh. OK. But I still think it’s a retcon.
But that tells nothing about if KH II was used to controll the missiles and where simply range-enhanced with the hermes buoy.
The thing is, to use Apollo the ships need their grav-sensors. They could propably use Apollos in an Broadside-approach, meaning, one side-wall onto the enemy. They sure won’t be able to use the new defense doctrine, where Keyhole is an integral part of.
So you could theoretically use Apollo with LAC’s, right?
They can tow 1 or 2 pods, have grav-coms and are expendable.
An single CLAC-Load of 96 LAC’s could kill 2-4 SD’s. From outside their range.
So even if there will be no logical reason I can’t see DW making Apollo independent from KH.
@Dave (26)
Massive numbers of pre-Apollo MDMs cannot counter Apollo. Chin’s attempted tactic in the Battle – i.e. course change once the ballistic phase starts – would make any launch of pre-Apollo MDM, however massive, useless. Apollo’s range advantage is just as important as the real-time control. It gives Manticore the same advantage as White Haven had at Barnett – being able to hit the defenders while the defenders are unable to respond.
And all I can say to your second comment is some “bluff”. If 68 SD(P)s were only able to shoot 2/3 out of 60 missiles, would they expect a higher success rate against 80 or 100?
@ Iggy (27)
David Weber’s infodump appears to contradict your assertion. Keyhole is specifically stated as being designed to control massive salvos. AAC has a conversation where we are told that the only difference in the Keyhole 2 units is the FTL comms. I cannot find any reference suggesting that the Apollo controls could not be located within a ship, just that the distance of Keyhole from the ship allows a larger number of bids to be controlled
@MadMacAl(33)
I don’t think so. The current snippet says that the control birds took 12 seconds to receipt the instructions. A LAC simply doesn’t have the kind of computer support to manage a battle on a fleet level. If it was towing some pods and fired them off the best it could do would be to send them in the right general direction and say “Hail Mary, Full of Grace…” while letting the control missile’s AI manage the battle.
Now, if the CLAC was managing the battle and using the LACs as grav pulse relays, things would be a bit different, but you’d still have longer communication times. Also, IIRC the SD’s had to have their entire missile control computer suite replaced for Apollo, the same would apply to a CLAC if you wanted to use the LACs to tow missiles to extreme range.
So Honor’s tactic of using the Hermes buoy makes sense as a special case because the buoy happened to be in the right place when it was needed. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense as a general tactic. At least as far as I can tell.
John Roth
Wyrm, Apollo does not provide any additional range, only additional effective range (pre-Apollo, the third stage of MDMs wasn’t all that useful). It’s using the same missiles (except for the control missile). If you’re willing to accept the really poor targeting a standard missile can manage without help from a warship’s fire control — and if you have huge numerical superiority, you can — you can fire MDMs with a ballistic phase to match the effective range of Apollo.
And the shot at Tourville’s fleet was a bluff because Honor only had enough fire control for 60 missiles, using the resources of an entire fleet, and all the recon buoys and Hermes buoys available because she’s in the Manticore system (she would not have been able to pull her bluff anywhere else). 60 missiles, even with near real time fire control, is not sufficient to destroy a single SD with anything resembling recent electronics.
If a non-KH II ship used Apollo missile pods, it would of course not be able to control them via FTL, but would still enjoy much greater accuracy, since the Apollo control bird has better computers a more powerful AI (per snippet 46).
>>In fact, if we lose the FTL link for any reason, the Apollo drops into autonomous >>mode, based on the prelaunch attack profiles loaded to it and the most recent >>commands it’s received. It’s actually capable of generating entirely new targeting >>and penetration commands on its own. They’re not going to be as good as the >>ones a waller’s tac department could generate for it if the link were still up, but >>we’re estimating something like a forty-two percent increase in terminal >>performance at extreme range as compared to any previous missile or, for that >>matter, our own Mark 23s with purely sub-light telemetry links, even if the Apollo >>bird is operating entirely on its own.”
Any ship can gain some benefit from the Apollo pods, even if they aren’t KH II equipped.
@Dave (36)
“and if you have huge numerical superiority, you can — you can fire MDMs with a ballistic phase to match the effective range of Apollo.”
Yes, Solly MSMs could match the range, but NOT match the effectiveness.
A course change by the Manties when the Solly MDMs go ballistic, and we all see pretty Solly fireworks going off in EMPTY space. A course change by the Sollies when the Manticoran Apollo MDMs go ballistic is countered by Apollo receiving new orders for the final attack run, and we all see pretty Solly fusion bottles blowing up when hit by X-Ray lasers.
@Dave(36)
MWW didn’t say Honor didn’t have the –fire control– to handle more than 60 missiles; she couldn’t have wiped out Chin if that was the case. She didn’t have the –communications bandwidth– to control more than 60 missiles through the single Hermes buoy she had available.
Chin was 5 light-minutes away, Second Fleet was 8 light-minutes away. In the snippet above, the simulated enemy ships are 4 light-minutes away, and that’s inside the effective direct communication range.
The bluff was that she was inside her effective engagement range of 2nd fleet, which she wasn’t. We don’t know how long it would have taken her to bring Second Fleet into range to pound it into scrap metal or how much damage Second Fleet could have done in the meantime. For all I know Second Fleet might have managed to make it over the hyper boundary before she could bring it into effective range. That was, I believe, the point of your comment in #30.
John Roth
I was always under the impression that Honor’s ‘attack’ with the 60 missiles was at least a semi-bluff. She could at that range target a single ship, and get a significant number of hits in close grouping, either down the throat or up the kilt. While these may not kill the ship, they should at least cripple it. Her problem is that while she is sniping individual ships, Tourville is going to slaughter the remnants of 3rd Fleet, and there is going to be a race between Tourville’s EW section, and Honor’s ability to take ships out. Tourville killed 2/3s of Honors first attack without having any clue about what they were facing, if they can continue to improve on that, eventually Honor wouldn’t be able to cause enough damage to take a ship out of the combat with a single salvo.
Lester Tourville is one of my farvite charters. I went a book with him in it. and I think we should have a book from the havite saide of things. does anyone think that would be intersting? you know see what the hivite charcters like to do with their time when not fighting honor?
It was a bluff. But only gradual. Tourville was done for. He couldn’t reach Sphinx or Manticore anymore. He didn’t have the staying power to stand up to their forts.
He was for all considerations shot dry.
And Honor with 8th fleet may not have been able to kill him outright at this moment.
So what?
No way he can outrun them.
Honor still sat outside the HL. Way outside. She could close the range down to 80 million klicks in a few minutes.
Then she could go hunting. Her ships where undamaged. Tourville was nearly crippled.
His ships where from the earliest designs way slower than Honors. Now…
No way that Tourville can keep Honor more than 70 million klicks away from him.
And that, we allready know is Apollo-Range.
@John Roth
I think you misunderstood my arguments. The idea was, if the real factor for Apollo was only the ftl-link, then every ship with an ftl-com could theoretically controll them.
Including LAC’s. Not very good, but still able to do it. The rewiring of the fire controll you mentioned was “only” for Keyhole.
#39 (Wyrm) – If you’re firing ten or twenty times as many missiles, it’s not a huge concern that they’re individually far less effective. Heck, if you’re figuring on extreme range engagements from beyond shipboard fire control’s effective range, you might sub out one or two missiles in your pod for the “control missile lite” (take an Apollo control missile, and remove the FTL comm equipment) that’s been bandied about at the bar. And I’m just not convinced that the ‘quick course change when the missiles hit ballistic phase’ is going to work very often; if you change your course enough that the missile can’t adjust to hit you when it fires off the next drive — and remember that even standard Honorverse missiles have some onboard sensors — then it seems to me that you’ll probably throw off your attack profile completely.
@Dave
I think you missunderstand the magnitude and implication of the decreased efficiency.
Admiral Chin completely ignored the volley from 8th fleet, because she knew that even such an overwhelming numerical salvoe would be way to inefficient to actually hurt her.
That where 7776 PODS. More than 62k Missiles. Against only 85 SD(P)’s. That are more than 730 Missiles per ship. Capital missiles.
If she would have seen any chance of them actually succeeding in the attack, she would have bailed out immediatly.
The thing is, without Apollo you have to program the missiles at the start. They have to search their targets in an given area.
The course change won’t make target acquisition impossible. But if you program your missiles somewhat intelligently you have search areas. The smallest is the primary, where you think the enemy will be. And from there you wide the area in steps, until you either run out of power, or find the targets.
The longer this phase is, asuming you find the targets at all, the farther your birds are from the targets. The worse the target solutions. The worse the attacking angles.
Combine that with the incredible low accuracy of MDM’s beyond extreme range and you will get an virtual no hit chance.
With Apollo you have the ability to tell the missiles exactly where to look. You are not dependend on the small throwaway-computers onboard the missiles, but can use the tactical computers onboard an entire fleet of SD(P)’s.
That makes the extended ranges possible at all.
@Dave (43)
“If you’re firing ten or twenty times as many missiles, it’s not a huge concern that they’re individually far less effective”
You continue to underestimate Apollo capabilities. We know, from te Battle of Manticore, that a single volley from three Apollo equipped SD(P) kills one SD(P) I suggest you start adding zeros to your estimates.
“and remember that even standard Honorverse missiles have some onboard sensors”
Addressed in snippet. Pre-Apollo technology relied on the wedge to protect their sensors. standard missiles would lose their sensors at extended ranges. It can be solved by the Sollies, and would be solved, but they would lose a large number of fleets before they had sufficient evidence to identify all the technical problems they need to solve.
“then it seems to me that you’ll probably throw off your attack profile completely”
Why??? The appropriate analogy for pre-Apollo MDMs on ballistic is the WW2 naval duel. If a ship zigs, then it’s opponent can’t change the flight path of a shell after it has left the gun. The sship then zags, and is acceptably close to the original course.
Sorry for dumb question, but something has been bugging me for several days now… It’s not coming to me right now… What is the range of non-Apollo MDM’s without any ballistic phase?
@Piotr1600
Range about 50 million klicks. However, accuracy at that range is not the best.
@34…
So I see… I never saw he response on the Bar and took what was written in AAC as literally the whole story in regards to Apollo’s capability’s…
My Mistake. So now we have two Apollo shortcomings…
~The Apollo Missle itself
~A Maximum Range