Solarian League Navy Personal

JeffEngel wrote:Exposition from Victor Cachat's POV in Crown of Slaves had the Maya Sector, were it to split off, as an independent nation more powerful than anything but the League itself. It's not, perhaps, supported by the maps we have or by the perceptions created by the rest of the narrative, but he's presumably well-informed and knows what he's thinking about.

That it's not small or trivial is also suggested by the "Maya Crisis" book from the future excerpted later.

Urph. Okay, even given that, I did overstate Maya some. At the time, Cachat would have been comparing Maya to -
1 - The Star Kingdom of Manticore, a single system plus sorta-annexed Basilisk and not-fully-annexed San Martin,
2 - The Republic of Haven, fresh out of civil war with a lot of planets occupied and maybe or maybe not interested in returning to it,
3 - The Silesian Confederacy, which is always on the verge of falling apart and threatened by the Anderman Empire,
4 - The Anderman Empire, before the Silesian annexation, and
5 - Whatever else that's out there that does not even register for us, all presumably (except for the League) considerably smaller than Haven in its prime.

So, he could have been right at the time without Maya being prospectively larger or more powerful than the currently much stronger SEM, RN, or AE, what with two of them being much expanded now and the third much restored.

Still, assuming he was right then, the Maya Sector is no small player.

kenl511 wrote:

Yow wrote:I wonder what the U.S. military would have done during World War Two when Japan destroyed the U.S. battleships, over ran its forward deployed commands and showed them how inferior it's forces were in comparison?

Wake Island, was supposed to be a one day fight, with at the most 3 attacker casualties per defender. Actual was three days with more than two weeks air attack between and ten times the casualties, December 1941.

Philippines were supposed to be six weeks at the most. Four months later the Battle of Corrigedor is just beginning.

There were a few American victories in the midst of the Japanese victories. The SLN has one victory, a de facto ambush.

The battle for Wake Island was a lot more devastating for Japan than that. IIRC the IJN suffered 2 CLs and 1 DD damaged plus 2 DDs sunk one by shore batteries and one by air attack. The IJN had to divert 2 CVs from the Pearl Harbor attack to help take the island.

saber964 wrote:

The battle for Wake Island was a lot more devastating for Japan than that. IIRC the IJN suffered 2 CLs and 1 DD damaged plus 2 DDs sunk one by shore batteries and one by air attack. The IJN had to divert 2 CVs from the Pearl Harbor attack to help take the island.

As I said there were some American victories in the opening months.

Although the largest Japanese defeat was inflicted by the KMT aided by the CCP/PLA during the first 6 months.

n7axw wrote:

svenhauke wrote:even if the SLN was at war, which it isn t, the crew would have access to 3d news and the internet equvialent, its not a police state... yet

so by this time everyone in the SLN knows that its lost a few million people and got no chance against the aliance

That's part of the point I was making. We are not talking about a naval ship in which everyone aboard would have access to am radio stations, some of which can be heard half way around the globe, cell phones or internet which can be picked up by satellite.

We are talking about spaceships, which can be separated by up to hundreds of light years of space from any sourse of news, some of which would arrive by couriers, some of which would come into the ship through its communications section, access to both which could be controlled by command staff if such news were to be deemed prejudicial to discipline.

Don

Others have mentioned some of this, but I thought I'd add a bit.

If the senior officers (or just the captain) of a SLN superdreadnaught decide to censor the crew's information, the crew will notice immediately that something very bad is going on, and be most upset. This, in itself, will be quite "prejudicial to discipline." After all, how often do you think news gets censored? They're a peace-time navy.