****A Call to Insurrection Spoiler****

Bluesqueak wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Speaking of Battleships, in ACTV, the Casey crew was surprised to learn that the IAN had a battleship. According to them, Jayne's (spelled "Jane's" in the book) said only the League had battleships. I could give the investigators a pass if the IAN had a single ship and kept it quiet they had one, not brandishing it during conquests. It would be obvious for anyone who visited the New Berlin system, but travel there was a year-long affair from the Core.

But here in ACTI, the IAN actually has 5 battleships. And not only that, they'd lost one capturing Tomlinson 20 years ago. What excuse can the Jayne's people have for missing that?

Jane’s is open source intelligence. Maybe the five battleships are classified? Maybe they thought the Andermani only had Vergeltung, and that must have been the battleship that got destroyed? The ‘five battleships’ is Axelrod’s intelligence, and they wouldn’t be fussy about their sources breaking the official secrets laws.

Another alternative is that the Andermani navy is - at that point - like the Grayson navy in Honor of the Queen (where it’s also called Jane’s). Grayson is too far off for Jane’s to even include, despite the Grayson’s having a navy. The Andermani get included, but Jane’s doesn’t have really up to date intelligence on that (then) far-off and rather weird Empire.

Axelrod, on the other hand, will have detailed, up to date information about the entire Haven Sector - including intelligence on one of the only two local powers capable of taking Manticore off them.

Backstory
RFC said (IIRC in a convention talk) that Gustav Andermani designed the first battleships while he was still a mercenary fleet commander in the League. Part of the agreements around getting them built (and thus him having more powerful ships than the League navy), and letting that much naval power go wandering off to form an empire, was that he'd share the designs with the League navy. The yard would build him the first BBs, then immediately build another tranche for the League.

It's unclear at this point whether the Andermani Empire has yet built up their yard(s) to the point where they can assemble new BBs - even with potentially importing components from the League. But Janes probably should have been able to find out how approximately how many BBs he left with; as they were build in the same yard that then build the League's. (It's not like he went to Potsdam and only then build 6 BBs)

(Though I guess it isn't impossible that the League and yard worked out a deal to keep it secret that Andermani got those first BBs; to hide the fact that for a little while his mercenary fleet was probably stronger than the League navy. And since he was immediately leaving for the back of beyond that might have assisted in keeping it all under wraps...)

Jonathan_S wrote:Backstory
RFC said (IIRC in a convention talk) that Gustav Andermani designed the first battleships while he was still a mercenary fleet commander in the League. Part of the agreements around getting them built (and thus him having more powerful ships than the League navy), and letting that much naval power go wandering off to form an empire, was that he'd share the designs with the League navy. The yard would build him the first BBs, then immediately build another tranche for the League.

It's unclear at this point whether the Andermani Empire has yet built up their yard(s) to the point where they can assemble new BBs - even with potentially importing components from the League. But Janes probably should have been able to find out how approximately how many BBs he left with; as they were build in the same yard that then build the League's. (It's not like he went to Potsdam and only then build 6 BBs)

(Though I guess it isn't impossible that the League and yard worked out a deal to keep it secret that Andermani got those first BBs; to hide the fact that for a little while his mercenary fleet was probably stronger than the League navy. And since he was immediately leaving for the back of beyond that might have assisted in keeping it all under wraps...)

Personally, I can definitely see a decision to allow an independent mercenary commander to build the five most powerful ships in the entire universe being classified as ‘Drop Dead Before Reading.’

In fact, it should probably be classified’MyGodWhatWereTheyThinking’.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:Is there any reason to think they didn't?
HMS Casey is a light cruiser, not a BC. They wouldn't have a lot of spare room, but they would have some space to bring back sample items for further investigation.
But they had fired missiles, so they would have space in their magazines for captured missiles. Whether they fit into the loaders is a different story -- they probably did, because all missiles are Solarian design these days. The other question would be whether carrying ammunition for use was ethical, since the ones at the Volsungs base might have been the result of theft or other fruit of the poisoned tree.

The "fruit of the poisoned tree" part is a bit lawyers. These -at worst- would have been spoils of war, and taken from defeated pirates at that, so carrying them would not, in my opinion, have been illegal. They may or may not have fit into the launchers but that is another conversation depending on how you powered/charged them etc. Any way you want to slice it, they were acquired as the result of a pirate hunting operation with Andermann Empire.

Thing is, it didn't specifically said the Casey brought back anything beyond the info in the pirate computer BUT they did have their hands on a lot of stuff the pirates had acquired. No, if they came by it though purchase (though perhaps illegal in the SL or various parts of Silesia) it doesn't matter, they salvaged it from pirates. Even if the weapons didn't fit the Casey's tubes, they would have been valuable from a technical standpoint. Same as would have been new impeller nodes, whatever the original origin. Or are you going to start calling in as yet unknown patent rights legislation with reguard to captured (not stolen) materials? You might as well say that any consumables taken from the pirate station -specifically "reaction mass" (and or potable water) or foodstuffs for the journey home should have been ignored because "it was not purchased from a "legal" source. Would the Casey not have topped up her various tanks etc before heading all the way back to Manticore?

All I really asked is why (other than not enough room in the plot) the RMN did not avail itself of the probable cornucopia of "stuff" as well as information they did extract and what was the present status of the haul when ACTI opens?

Jonathan_S wrote:(Though I guess it isn't impossible that the League and yard worked out a deal to keep it secret that Andermani got those first BBs; to hide the fact that for a little while his mercenary fleet was probably stronger than the League navy. And since he was immediately leaving for the back of beyond that might have assisted in keeping it all under wraps...)

This makes a lot of sense. Jane's people wouldn't bother travelling to beyond the end of nowhere to see if Anderman had something that the SLN Had only just started getting. And the Tomlinson reports that they managed to ambush and destroy a battleship could have been dismissed as a exaggeration and propaganda. The Andermani simply had to never confirm or deny the losses, saying that military matters were a state secret.

Brigade XO wrote:The "fruit of the poisoned tree" part is a bit lawyers. These -at worst- would have been spoils of war, and taken from defeated pirates at that, so carrying them would not, in my opinion, have been illegal. They may or may not have fit into the launchers but that is another conversation depending on how you powered/charged them etc. Any way you want to slice it, they were acquired as the result of a pirate hunting operation with Andermann Empire.

Spoils of war against a legitimate opponent I agree.

But pirates are not legal combatants. They usually source their components via theft, so those parts don't belong to them or their sponsoring state, but to independent businesses or states that would like to see their property back. Missiles, in particular, would have come from some foreign military unit.

So my question is whether the RMN should return that property instead of using it, if it can determine the rightful owner.

Thing is, it didn't specifically said the Casey brought back anything beyond the info in the pirate computer BUT they did have their hands on a lot of stuff the pirates had acquired. No, if they came by it though purchase (though perhaps illegal in the SL or various parts of Silesia) it doesn't matter, they salvaged it from pirates. Even if the weapons didn't fit the Casey's tubes, they would have been valuable from a technical standpoint. Same as would have been new impeller nodes, whatever the original origin. Or are you going to start calling in as yet unknown patent rights legislation with reguard to captured (not stolen) materials? You might as well say that any consumables taken from the pirate station -specifically "reaction mass" (and or potable water) or foodstuffs for the journey home should have been ignored because "it was not purchased from a "legal" source. Would the Casey not have topped up her various tanks etc before heading all the way back to Manticore?

There's such a thing as exigent circumstances, but both the IAN and RMN should make an effort to return property to the rightful owners. Sure, in lots cases it doesn't make sense: the property might have such a low value that it doesn't make sense shipping back, or the owner can't be determined, or it's not feasible to return to that entity due to travel distance. But take for example the captured freighters: those cost billions of Manticore dollars. The hull numbers and other ID should be enough to pinpoint the owners and return them.

None of that forbids examining the material captured. Especially military material, even if they could beyond a shadow of the doubt that it was a Havenite or Solarian missile. In fact, to determine where things came from, they HAD to examine.

All I really asked is why (other than not enough room in the plot) the RMN did not avail itself of the probable cornucopia of "stuff" as well as information they did extract and what was the present status of the haul when ACTI opens?

And I'm asking why you think they didn't. If you're asking if they brought more material for SIS and RMN to examine at their leisure, I'd say it's likely they did and simply didn't make it into the book. It wasn't relevant, but was SOP.

If you meant bringing enough parts to replenish the RMN's perennial lack of spares, there simply wasn't enough space to make much of a dent. Casey is a 75k tonne light cruiser and they had a 2.5 month trip ahead of them to get home. Whatever cargo space they had, had to be first prioritised for the intelligence material, to try and discover who was paying the Volsungs, and any other military-relevant intel. That would include portions of impellers and nodes, a missile or two that had interesting technology, some hardware that isn't generally available to the public, etc. Then they wouldn't know how much the parts would be compatible or worth the time to haul away: the quartermaster aboard Casey would have only had a few days to make the determination, anyway.

And it wouldn't make much of a difference to the RMN, I think. Even though the RMN is cash-strapped, they still field 20+ ships, five of them battlecruisers (Nike, Swiftsure, Invicible, Victory, Vanguard)

Brigade XO wrote:
All I really asked is why (other than not enough room in the plot) the RMN did not avail itself of the probable cornucopia of "stuff" as well as information they did extract and what was the present status of the haul when ACTI opens?

I brought this up many times when the 3rd book came out - Even a couple boxes of spare parts like those stupid hexes whould have been immensely valuable to the RMN. Taking enough missiles to refill your mags is just a no brainer. I even advocated for taking the time to drag the collapsable repair bays and any of the surviving pirate ships under repair out to the oort cloud and hiding them for a return party (remember, many of those DDs and FGs were the same model as the ships used by the RMN) just a parts salvage operation would be worth it for the RMN, and an intact ship worth it's weight in gold.

Of course , it was brought up that if they had terried, the Axelrod force would have killed them - but they didn't know that. Long (and Hauptman) should have pushed for grabbing as much as possible - and didn't.

I will defer to the Casey's captain bringing back what he thought relevant for investigation based on the recommendations of Long and Hauptman plus whatever his chief engineer suggested would be "useful" for the ship.

I had sounded like the Andermani took the freighters to move the people on the planet back to then Governor who's property the system was supposed to be. I suspect the disposition of the freighters would hinge on the identification as to who may or may not have owned them. The warships- I don't see the Andermani letting them go if they could put even skeleton crews on them and take them home.

Theemile wrote:I brought this up many times when the 3rd book came out - Even a couple boxes of spare parts like those stupid hexes whould have been immensely valuable to the RMN. Taking enough missiles to refill your mags is just a no brainer.

I don't see how filling your holds with hexes and quads would be useful. It would be a drop in the bucket.

I'm betting that for the price of a single missile, the RMN could buy two or three year's worth of them. They're electronics components that the POs could repair and they were used everywhere, so they had to be standardised, mass-produced parts that couldn't have been THAT complex to be expensive in the first place. The problem wasn't price, it was the accountants nominated by Breakwater penny-pinching. They probably created a formula that said that a ship needed N hexes and M quads per thousand tonne per year and then they wouldn't supply more than that. Or the formula is for the entire RMN but not including the battlecruisers.

After the invasion, hopefully that has changed, If they're de-mothballing battlecruisers, they must find the budget somewhere.

At this point, you also have to wonder of Breakwater had gone somewhat nuts. He had carved out that local S&R/ in-system force at the expect of the Navy and was crippling the Navy's ability to do its job. All he wanted was credit for what worked and kept shoveling any of his mistakes under taking the credit for heroic work of the Manticore spacers.

\

Brigade XO wrote:At this point, you also have to wonder of Breakwater had gone somewhat nuts. He had carved out that local S&R/ in-system force at the expect of the Navy and was crippling the Navy's ability to do its job. All he wanted was credit for what worked and kept shoveling any of his mistakes under taking the credit for heroic work of the Manticore spacers.

\

In the beginning, he was under the illusion it was all rainbows and there were no threats. Then there was a pirate hijacking right there in the Manticore system, a pirate attack in Secour, which he'd have reasoned that proper light-weight patrol vessels would suffice to protect Manticore.

Not after the Volsung invasion. After this, it was clear there was someone with deep funds and serious hardware to take over Manticore. However, he and his supporters came to all the wrong conclusions in the aftermath of the battle: they concluded that small ships could swarm bigger ones. I don't think he was greedy enough to willingly and knowingly compromise national security: don't attribute to malice what can be best explained by stupidity.

Here's the thing: given the naval battles we've seen, he's not completely wrong. Given the number of missiles fired and the relative firepower of a battlecruiser, destroyers and corvettes can indeed swarm a bigger opponent. That's far more difficult in Honor's time (even at OBS), given the presence of rapid-firing grasers and the number of missiles a BC or DN could fire in a salvo. Not to mention the laserheads making missiles attack from much further range.

But the butcher's bill would be very big. It would probably take 10x the number of smaller platforms to swarm a properly-protected BC or two. That's something David has said: the RMN (in Honor's time) knows this and wouldn't waste spacers' lives like that.

So my thinking is that Breakwater believes his own arguments, but had also failed to take them to the logical conclusion because he is not a naval strategist. And even then, the Exchequer would still need to fund 30-50 ships between the MPARS and RMN. In proper condition and with full autocannon loads.