kzt wrote:The qualitative and quantitative margins between the Peeps and the MA were not shifting in the Peeps favor, so the longer the war goes on the worse it gets. They were at their strongest the first battle of the war, whose time and place they got to choose. They choose poorly.
The Peeps were at a wartime mobilization level, so they really can't go any higher. The MA is not, and they have major shipyards under construction, so the opposing forces will increase over time unless they take those shipyards.
Similarly, the Peeps had already determined that the RMNs tech as better then their, so a safe assumption is that the margin does not close, a pessimistic one is that it opens and it takes a real nut to think that they will gain parity.
Though they do have to balance that against the historic trend that the first use of a new weapons or tactic is often when it is most effective - before the enemy has a chance to develop tactics or equipment to blunt the edge that the surprise gave you.
Throwing everything into an all or nothing attack on Manticore risks losing if Manticore's surprises give it too much of an edge - an edge it wouldn't necessarily have in that fight if forced to show it's abilities in earlier less climatic battles.
Certainly it appears the Peeps spread their initial attacks too widely and didn't concentrate their forces sufficiently. But there's room to concentrate their forces more yet hit a few other targets to force Manticore to show it's hand. Finding out about missile pods by rolling over, say, Hancock with overwhelming force lets them attempt to mitigate that risk when they hit Manticore and it's heavier defenses. And that's hardly the only thing where effectiveness drops after exposure. Given a bit of time to analyse the ECM and decoys the RMN used against Haven's missiles and combat data on RMN missile pen-aids and effectiveness Haven can improve their active and passive missile defense while also reducing the susceptibility of their missiles to the RMN's active and passive defense (of course if any RMN forces get away then they'll bring the hard earned sensor data that will let the RMN improve their active and passive defenses. But given that the RMN started with a significant advantage in missile combat overall the improvements on both sides will tend to narrow that relative gap; as we saw happening in the actual war until Manticore had time to introduce new generations of hardware)
So I'd argue that the best course for the Peeps would to be pursue a short war, but not a single battle war. Aim for a short campaign of a 4-6 battles. That gives time to adjust to surprises and, worse comes to worse, failures aren't as likely to be immediately war losing. They'd have the chance to try to convert to a longer attritional war if the initial battles show they're unlikely to be able to successfully attack the Manticore system.
(Sure, we know that ultimately the Peeps lost the attritional war; and would be likely to do so again. But it still looks to them like a less risky option that risking the war on a single throw of the dice).
The problem of course is that this intermediate approach likely requires
more total deployed forces than the all-or-nothing attack -- because you'll lose some ships to destruction or combat damage in those couple battles that proceed the attack on Manticore. But, unless the RMN is foolish enough to further disperse Home Fleet, you'll still need nearly as large a force for the attack on Manticore (despite expecting to narrow the per-unit combat effectiveness gap due to adjusting to RMN equipment and tactics)
