SPOILER: Post CoG prognostications; ONI & SIS near Talbot

Hi Weird Harold,

Again the FF Gladiator's were very very good, and the Nevada's are first rate against anything except the GA, which they aren't going to face , so I'd use them if the alternative was nothing much at all, wouldn't you?

What got sent back were the Apollo's; Mike's SDP's have lots of Mk-23's including ammunition ships full, so maintenance wise, the system SD versions are more than likely.

Parsing what RFC has said has become an art form, and RFC's comment was aimed more at the BF SD's than the FF's, and again doesn't preclude the TQG using them.

Others have suggested this pearl quote means RFC intends the captured SLN ships to be spies or Trojan horses etc, but being confident what RFC will do almost ensures complete failure.

Given the various higher priorities, Mk-25's etc will take quite a while to be deployed in the TQ, even if Beowulf has already started producing them in September or October.

Given Mike left month's ago for Meyers, the TQG has probably already taken them in hand.

L

Weird Harold wrote:

lyonheart wrote:There aren't any Apollo system Defense pods in the TQ, yet.

What they've got are the pre-Apollo Mk-23's, which leave quite a bit to be desired, but they're certainly better than nothing.

I'm pretty sure that all Mk23s were withdrawn from the TQ after the Yawata Strike. I'm not sure what they were replaced with, but the plan was for Mk25 Apollos and Moriarity (as is being provided to Beowulf.)

The LACs are sufficient for most threats and the SLN has been pushed back by Adm Gold Peak far enough they're going to be more concerned with reclaiming lost systems than taking new ones.

lyonheart wrote:Story wise, do you want pirates to discover why RMN LAC's have the mission, or do you want them scared off by word from freighters passing through that they have SL/RMN SD's in orbit, albeit old or obsolete?

Blood-thirsty beast that I am, I'd prefer for pirates to make a fatal underestimation of TQ defenses. Every pilot destroyed is one less to take his depredations to a less well protected target.

lyonheart wrote:The 69 FF ships whether they're new Gladiator's or Nevada's or old Ramparts and Mulligan's, are more than adequate against the rest of the verge apparently, ...

I agree with SFC that all of the captured SLN ships are "worthless as warships." For the manpower and operating costs of one SLN BC, they can man a dozen or so LACs totaling five or ten times the war-fighting ability of the SLN BC.

Hi KZT,

More often, its the upper middle class or local born gentry, who know they're just as smart, educated etc as the idiots currently in charge.

The resistance movements Firebrand's dealing with evidently haven't been penetrated yet, though that begs some interesting questions.

If you were the MAlign, wouldn't you have at least some agents on the ground at all levels among your neighbors?

How far out [100-200LY?] would you have such agents?

Remember the limited maps we have don't plot every member or verge system because the actual member density of the SL is around 14.7 LY radius each or just over 29 LY between members, which doesn't include OFS protectorates inside the border of the SL from later colonization of failed or overlooked systems, etc.

For how long would you have posted such agents?

Given the nature of the MAlign conspiracy it would have been done centuries ago, but might have encountered the problem of the early agents families have become too prominent, requiring fresh blood at the plebe level, which might be amusing to some MAlg observers.

The likelihood that such agents were long on the ground, keeping to the more shadowy upper subordinate to mid manager level of the resistance, would make it very dangerous for the ONI's CIT teams, though I'd expect ONI and them to recognise that going in.

But don't you agree there's great story potential here?

L

kzt wrote:People who start and run rebellions and terrorists movements are almost always the children of the successful and connected, from middle-class to wealthy.

In countries with really oppressive governments most of these movements are infiltrated almost immediately by the government security organizations. The KGB and daughter agencies like the Stassi and Seguridad del Estado really are very competent at what they do. In some cases they will compromise the leaders, in other cases they will become the second or 3rd tier of the organization while monitoring the leaders. But anyone meeting people in these organizations will be noted and handled.

Sometimes the security services comprise the majority of secret organizations, and often they are the ones who make the organization work, doing the drudge work and paying their dues.

You can see this in the US, when the KKK financially collapsed when the FBI and other police agents stopped paying their dues after they decided the threat of violence had become minimal.

lyonheart wrote:Hi Weird Harold,

Again the FF Gladiator's were very very good, and the Nevada's are first rate against anything except the GA, which they aren't going to face , so I'd use them if the alternative was nothing much at all, wouldn't you?

Erm... we don't have any evidence of this. The only time we saw Gladiators in combat (unless I'm forgetting something from recent books), one Sag-B took out 4 of them. Yes, the crews were sub-standard, but still...

And the Gladiators and Nevadas have all the problems of not being true laser head era designs that every ship in the SLN's inventory suffers from. We don't know what leading-edge SDFs have done; we do know that against Haven sector ships, SLN warships don't have a chance against anything in their tonnage range.

While hypercapable ships will tke time to build, LAC and pods not so much. They could get them from the andies and haven, while not as advanced, still good tech.
if they expect the raiding strategy, they could mess with by striking at their logistical network, that will limit their capabilities. I also expect the transtelkars interfereing demanding intervention, while order to concentrate on manticore.
manticore wants intelligence about rebellions, ask the sector givenor or look at his files, they would at least cover their neighbours. The rebellions believe the ma ties will intervene, so they need to be reasonably close to where they can be reached.

lyonheart wrote:But don't you agree there's great story potential here?

Sure, though hopefully better edited then the most recent book...

Anyhow, I came across an interesting article on how government agent provocateurs actually work, written by an ex-DEA supervisory agent who presumably knows more then a little about this first hand. However it is on a pretty much way out-there site so if you click any of the links on the page with his article don't say I didn't warn you that you might not want to. Are You Talking to a Provocateur?

TL;DR version: An agent provocateur is the guy you'll find if you look for the "resistance", because he is the one who is fearlessly visible and the guy at the front of the room pushing a peaceful opposition movement into "action".

Hi Drothgery,

Where is the idea they're not true laserhead designs when they were designed and built 50 years after laserheads were recognised as a serious threat?

FF simply isn't that slow and incompetent.

Please read again what Helen had to say about them in CoS [being almost as good as the RMN], besides the SotS descriptions including their excellent stealth, or the general opinion by all observers [not just the RMN] that Oversteegen and his crew were far more critical to their eventual victory than the Sag-B heavy cruiser itself, though some posters have credited the bow and rear sidewalls being crucial in the hyperspace battles with the two Gladiators that followed Gauntlet there, though Gauntlet had expended 85% of her missiles before launching on the last pirate in orbit.

L

drothgery wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi Weird Harold,

Again the FF Gladiator's were very very good, and the Nevada's are first rate against anything except the GA, which they aren't going to face , so I'd use them if the alternative was nothing much at all, wouldn't you?

Erm... we don't have any evidence of this. The only time we saw Gladiators in combat (unless I'm forgetting something from recent books), one Sag-B took out 4 of them. Yes, the crews were sub-standard, but still...

And the Gladiators and Nevadas have all the problems of not being true laser head era designs that every ship in the SLN's inventory suffers from. We don't know what leading-edge SDFs have done; we do know that against Haven sector ships, SLN warships don't have a chance against anything in their tonnage range.

lyonheart wrote:Hi Drothgery,

Where is the idea they're not true laserhead designs when they were designed and built 50 years after laserheads were recognised as a serious threat?

FF simply isn't that slow and incompetent.

Please read again what Helen had to say about them in CoS [being almost as good as the RMN], besides the SotS descriptions including their excellent stealth, or the general opinion by all observers [not just the RMN] that Oversteegen and his crew were far more critical to their eventual victory than the Sag-B heavy cruiser itself, though some posters have credited the bow and rear sidewalls being crucial in the hyperspace battles with the two Gladiators that followed Gauntlet there, though Gauntlet had expended 85% of her missiles before launching on the last pirate in orbit.

Erm... also read what RFC had to say on that afterward. He's been back-pedaling on anything good he had to say about the SLN's deployed tech since then. Helen in CoS is a cadet; she does not have access to top-level ONI reports on SLN tech and has the expectation that first-line SLN ships aren't junk.

The Gladiators' stealth was much better than Oversteegen expected from pirates. It was not close to as good as Manticoran, or even first-line Havenite at the time. And we know that the SLN's newest, first-line BCs (Nevada) are minimally different from their predecessors (Indefatigable), and have the severe lack of point defense that categorizes pre-laser head designs. It seems to me that it's unlikely that a contemporary CA would not have the same defects.

While the SLN ships were designed post-laserhead, they were designed to operate against opponents who could only fire single salvo, single broadside. At the time they were designed no one had conceptualized an opponent that would have off bore firing capabilities or enough fire control to manage that large of a salvo. Especially not a double stacked salvo. So they ended up facing ships that could fire and control 4 times the number of missiles that their designers allowed for.

Hi KNick,

Totally agree except it was pods, not off bore missiles etc, that made all then current designs obsolete.

If MAlign agents besides arrogant SLN senior officers deleted or hid reports of missile pods being used in large numbers, its not the fault of the FF.

But in case you didn't check, the RMN Reliant BC has 32 CM's and 32 PDC's to the Nevada's 36 and 48 respectively, compared to the much earlier Indefatigable's 16 and 32.

Which happens to be the same number as BF's Scientist and Vega SD's; and a BC having the same number of defenses as an SD doesn't reflect badly on FF IMO, rather the opposite.

The ignorance displayed by BF from Rajampet on down that they don't know FF BC's have the same number of CM launchers and PDC's is truly amazing, albeit perhaps they're not as heavy might excuse that, though Caparelli's point of just how light the defensive upgrades to BF's SD's disputes that.

All of which supports the idea that FF at least has some brains somewhere, including at Navy HQ.

L

KNick wrote:While the SLN ships were designed post-laserhead, they were designed to operate against opponents who could only fire single salvo, single broadside. At the time they were designed no one had conceptualized an opponent that would have off bore firing capabilities or enough fire control to manage that large of a salvo. Especially not a double stacked salvo. So they ended up facing ships that could fire and control 4 times the number of missiles that their designers allowed for.

Hi Drothgery,

Which pearl or post are you referring to that denigrates the FF?

Most if not all such posts RFC has made refer generally to BF, not the FF.

If you have a specific example, I look forward to it but I don't recall any.

I think any comparison from the textev etc indicates the Nevada's by FF standards are a considerable step up from the Indefatigable's, as are the Gladiators, being as massive as the Sag-B's etc.

There is the time element involved; in CoS the War Harvest DD's were modern and up-to-date, but that was written in 2003, current books now imply they're almost as old as the Ramparts though the honorverse time lapse has been less than 3 years, not more than the ten in ours.

The textev indications I have are that the FF designs and builds new classes a lot more frequently than the BF, which are much closer to the same standards as the RMN, RHN, etc.

A new generation in each class every 25-30 years, not at the same time, seemed quite reasonable from the few hints we got.

Indeed it helps explain the numbers, and some posts of RFC at the bar seemed to confirm this, granted that was a few years back.

The Indefatigable in fact was quite important as a very large modern BC; evidently a model for both the RMN and PRHN from the early textev if not almost all navies at that time, and probably one of the first large FF if not SLN designs, that dealt with laserheads if not the huge numbers that became common in the Haven Sector.

L

drothgery wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi Drothgery,

Where is the idea they're not true laserhead designs when they were designed and built 50 years after laserheads were recognised as a serious threat?

FF simply isn't that slow and incompetent.

Please read again what Helen had to say about them in CoS [being almost as good as the RMN], besides the SotS descriptions including their excellent stealth, or the general opinion by all observers [not just the RMN] that Oversteegen and his crew were far more critical to their eventual victory than the Sag-B heavy cruiser itself, though some posters have credited the bow and rear sidewalls being crucial in the hyperspace battles with the two Gladiators that followed Gauntlet there, though Gauntlet had expended 85% of her missiles before launching on the last pirate in orbit.

Erm... also read what RFC had to say on that afterward. He's been back-pedaling on anything good he had to say about the SLN's deployed tech since then. Helen in CoS is a cadet; she does not have access to top-level ONI reports on SLN tech and has the expectation that first-line SLN ships aren't junk.

The Gladiators' stealth was much better than Oversteegen expected from pirates. It was not close to as good as Manticoran, or even first-line Havenite at the time. And we know that the SLN's newest, first-line BCs (Nevada) are minimally different from their predecessors (Indefatigable), and have the severe lack of point defense that categorizes pre-laser head designs. It seems to me that it's unlikely that a contemporary CA would not have the same defects.