quite possibly a cat wrote:Byng was terrible! I wanted to smack him for being so stupid. He could have gotten such perfect revenge against the Manties, and he blew it!
1) He should have ordered all non-SLN ships to come to a nice orbit, declare themselves and power-down as soon as possible. Any other assets they have in space need to be declared and powered down as well. If the manties cooperate you can just skip to "4", since refusal to cooperate proves guilt.
2) Assuming you get compliance, you can then start the investigation. First you need to secure any armed ships. This means the crews will have to get out, but you do have some spare space in the brig. You'll also obviously need full control and access to every ship. The civilian ships should be cleared pretty quickly because they don't randomly carry nukes or stealth tech. That leaves the Mantie military ships.
3) The investigation would find nothing amiss with any ship at all, except one of the probes that the Manties super stealthy probes they supposedly launched is missing. Not there. So weird. Didn't find anything at the spot they declared a drone was at. Of course, after searching the reports you find an example of Manties using nuke armed stealth drones as a weapon. It fits their MO. They can't account for the drone. And this is the star nation that stiffed them. You have means, motive, opportunity, them lying, and it matches tech only they have.
4) Finally you finish up by interrogating a Manty captain who has been steeped in the Saganami tradition. Obviously there will be assorted people to observe so you don't mistreat the Manty captain. After you point out that the Manties are pirates since there wasn't a declared war, and unless there is evidence that the rest of the crew is innocent you'll execute them all, he'll confess to the whole thing and say his crew had nothing to do with it.
At this point you seize the ship from the captain that confessed and now have all the fancy Manty tech.
Either way, you have proof the Manties did it, and you have a confession. Case closed. Manties just murdered over forty thousand civilians as far as anyone else knows.
As a free bonus, TIY will pay a ton for your prize ship. And your intelligence service will probably be pretty happy about getting to examine the probe you didn't find.
No captain of a warship- of ANY nation- worthy of holding that position is going to roll over and show his belly like that.
You don't strike your colors (or, in the Honorverse, your wedge) and submit to being boarded and 'inspected' by a foreign navy in a neutral port or anywhere else. Just having the temerity to make such a demand is a good way to end up getting shot at on general principle.
The only difference in the outcome would have been the Manty destroyers' wedges would have been building up when Byng fired instead of being completely down and their backstopping ship would have gotten a recording of a Solly admiral making such outrageous demands.
EDIT
Come to think of it, the Manties are good enough to have probably gotten off a few shots, too, before they were destroyed.