The most impressive thing to me here is that 5000 missiles was not enough to win the day---in fact, they only inflicted ~1/2 the damage. I guess we lack a full understanding of the defensive screen but apparently it was on the order of 500 smallcraft and 60 dropships. How many MGs on target would that work out to?
There's a few things. One, the fleet was bigger than you might think. I gave First Fleet a third(generally rounding up) of all 2/3 and 4/6 Terran ships except the corvettes, plus a standard load of support craft, which worked out to:
Dart 5 (1 died)
Quixote 14 (6 died)
Monsoon 6 (2 died)
Aegis 4 (3 died)
Cruiser 10 (7 died)
Lola 8 (3 died)
Bonaventure 8 (1 died)
Vigilant 6 (3 died)
DropShip 186 (61 died, though technically a few of those may be loyalist)
Small craft 318 (roughly half died)
Fighter 480 plus carrier DS fighters (over half died)
I assumed that a good chunk of those DS would be carrier-fit, which is why the total fighter force was over a thousand - in principle, 186 DS could carry 2232 fighters, but they need cargo and combat drop DS as well, so I made it about 30% carriers. The THN has a strong focus on light elements as screening units, so I assumed they have more MGs on those screens than most. I haven't worked out the numbers, but if we say for sake of argument that the average fighter carries 2 MG, the average SC carries 6, and the average DS carries 24, that's around 8400 MG in the support fleet. They'll be less effective than 8400 WarShip MGs would be, but they'll still pack a punch.
The second thing is that both sides rolled pretty bad for crew skill. You saw that in a couple ways - the loyalists took a minute and a half between missile volleys(a turn is one minute, so this implies a very poor fire rate), and their hit rate was weak. The rebel crew being weak showed up more in the incredibly slow attack on Castle Cameron(12 hours to crush one battalion, in a
coup d'etat? That's abysmal), and in their rather weak fighter work. But in any case, a lot of those missiles missed - it was a long-range shot, and that hurts accuracy even before your crews turn out to be weak.
Three, the damage isn't as low as you might think. 1000 missiles at Kentares killed four ships, with virtually no defensive screen. 5000 missiles at Terra killed 12 ships, through a fairly substantial defensive screen. Also, the ships targeted this time were mostly tougher - a Black Lion has 630 total HP, while a Monsoon has 1177. Most of the heavier ships that died were killed by missiles, because the PPCs did their best work against the screening cruisers in the opening part of the engagement.
Edit: Also, let's look at an Ancile's design mass. 7,200 tons of fighters, 20,400 tons of missile launchers and ammo, and 9,000 tons of PPCs (not counting heat sinks or fire control). Do you feel that I was under-valuing the fighters in that analysis?
Related to dropships, I realize I had been assuming that they are vulnerable to ASF weapons, but they instead appear to be partially (or more) immune. This brings up the topic of weapon bays: is a dropship immune to damage from it's own weapon bays? In terms of total damage, maybe not, but in terms of per-weapon damage, maybe yes?
DropShips are vulnerable to ASF weapons. They didn't get much fire from capital weapons in the whole fight, and 61 DropShips died. That was entirely fighter cannons at work. A heavy DS can carry about as much armour as a light WS like the Bonaventure or the Kutai, but those can die to fighters too. And the DS has far less SI, so it dies faster when the armour does get breached than a WarShip would.
Ironically as the guy who built Walkurie, Im headed away from carriers. The same balance choices necessary to make an interesting batrep, that allow the basically undefended stock ships and stock defense networks to exist in the face of all-up all-in fighter/missile launches ensures that even a half-hearted investment in defense will remove those missile strikes from a role as a decisive instrument. To wit... a .5 ton machine gun kills between .5 and 1.5 50 ton missiles. 1:100. At such odds, it costs (formally) 1% of your weapons tonnage to shoot down all the missiles launched by an opponent of similar throw-weight... and then only if he can put all his missiles in space simultaneously, without even launchers or fighters (and of course he cannot). A slightly larger invetment, of say 2% of your total weapons fit, will destroy your entire weapon mass in missiles on their worst day/roll.
Now, of course, the necessity if fire control, or dispersal onto small craft or fighters, renders this imperfect. And 1000xMG LBS/RBS/Nose/Aft implies some inefficiency. But even so, the core 100:1 is to my mind insurmountable, and future warships will likely carry only defensive fighters as can be managed without an impact on the 2% of weapons fit ideally put aside for AAA/PDS suite.
Worked example. A generic 15% Warload 150 SI 3/5 ship of 1MT will have 150,000 tons of armament. 3000 tons, or 2% of that, approx 800 tons each on 4 facings. 220 MG massing 1.5 tons each (after fire control) gives a total of 880 machine guns, shooting down 440-1220 ASMs. A 1MT awalkurie knockoff will launch about 1000 fighters (while being slower and more fragile) and only a small portion will on average make it through to the target. Barring reload and relaunch, the Walkure are overrun and destroyed while inflicting little damage on their cousins - while same cousins retain 147K of 150K for anti-shipping work.
The above is done in my head from an Iphone, so likely contains many errors, but I hope it explains my reasoning. Its also possible that as PDS belts spread, under-the-hood improvements in missiles may drastically lower the P(k) of each Machine-gun shot at a missile (as we discussed above) or the GM may look at the point defense paradigm differently (as shown, look-shoot-shoot is massively less efficient than look-shoot-look-shoot). But Im certainly seeing that the wall for Walkurie may have handwriting on it, and part of the reason for big yard investment is that, in the absence if combat experience, the Lyrans fear to risk bulding ships that are obsolescent, or may be casually rendered so by a trivial investment in defenses. Yards will remain useful, and allow efficient production of the ‘next thing’ once that reveals itself.
My goal is for all sane ship types to be viable, so I want to develop a universe where that's the case. I hope my thumb will not need to go on the scale, but I want to give each unit a role. Maybe I need to put each unit in its element more often - carriers might have poor damage-per-ton ratios in a knife fight, but they have longer range than any other unit. Perhaps I need to show that off more often. Haven't had a carrier-heavy force get a good commander roll in a while, though, so there's been a lack of good opportunities.
Combat Shuttles on Exercise Get 'Lost', Conduct Coup...
That sounds eerily familiar...
??? ??? okay what am I missing
I modeled it off a scene in one of the early Honor Harrington novels, which Marcus has also read. (Actually not a coup, though - the coups in Haven used different appraoches, that was the scene where they found the duelist hiding in a cabin on Gryphon).
Likewise, Kiviar caught
the not-very-subtle reference in 2394 pretty quickly.
