How was Haven supposed to fight the SL (Detweiler Plan)?

tlb wrote:To repeat what I have said several times before: Oyster Bay was planned and executed so that there was NO EE violation. The book takes care to emphasize this. Debris of an attack falling onto a planet does not count.

So this is from the Wiki:

In essence, the Edict required star nations to take all reasonable precautions to avoid civilian deaths. Indiscriminate warfare affecting a planet’s surface or biosphere would violate the Edict and guarantee Solarian intervention on behalf of the survivors.
The Edict didn’t offer a blanket protection for noncombatants. For example, if a belligerent struck a planetary defense center located in the middle of a metropolitan area, killing many civilians, this probably would not violate the Edict “if the attacker does everything possible to restrain the effect of the attack on the population as a whole.” An orbital strike using Kinetic energy weapons on the defense center and everything within a two block radius would be allowable under the Edict. The restrictions were limited to avoiding the needless death and destruction of targets that could not threaten the attacking navy.
The majority of the onus of following the Epsilon Eridani Edict lay with the attacker. First, the attacker must control the system, such that the system had no hope of relief and/or rescue. Second, the attacker must call upon the planet to surrender before commencing any attack or bombardment. Thus, a raiding ship was not allowed to hyper in and launch a few missiles at the planet, for it neither controlled the system nor called upon the system to surrender.
As a corollary, any accidents which resulted in massive civilian deaths were considered a violation of the Edict. The Edict assumed that any such accident was preventable and that the nation that allowed it to happen was a rogue state.
The Edict had been enforced about five times prior to 1921 PD.

1) The attacks killed between 20 and 30 million people the vast majority of them civilians without so much as a warning.
2) Accidently killing 8 million people on a planet because you attacked is still a according to the wiki an EE violation. It was avoidable.
3) The people behind OB did NOT control the orbitals or the system, they essentially did a drive by on the orbital infrastructure and one or more of their torpedo's/missiles could have hit the planet, worse they destroyed the infrastructure without taking every reasonable precaution to avoid civilian casualties on the ground...we aren't even going to touch the millions killed in space without warning.

OB might not have been planned as an EE violation but killing 8 million people on a planet sure helps the argument that it was one whether they meant it as a violation or not.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:
Don't forget that the GSN had a shit load of BC(P)s.

Can you imagine the tactical as well as strategic surprise when 40+ BC(P)s with the firepower of a dozen SD(P)s crash your party when you attack​ Grayson?

Which Whitehaven said couldn't stand up to Wallers. So destroying the bulk of the SD(P)'s in the opening stages of the war would have been a complete defeat, the GSN's BC(P)'s would not be anywhere near enough to make up for the difference even if the RHN lost half of all attacking forces. Having 65 SD(P)'s and 46 BC(P)'s wouldn't be enough to offset that fact that the Alliance would be outnumbered 2.5-1 in SD(P)'s.

No RMN, no IAN, No Trevor's Star means the war is effectively over. That's assuming the GSN is present at Trevor's Star. If they were a week or two late leaving Grayson the total Alliance Fleet jumps up to 128 SD(P)'s-115 SD(P)'s for the GSN and 13 for the RMN. At that point if the RHN attacks with overwhelming force they can crush 84% of the RMN's SD(P)'s in two separate battles while losing significantly less in the process. Even if the RHN takes 25% casualties in Manticore that would still be almost the equivalent of the entire GSN remaining in orbit.

kzt wrote:Wall of text, with this ultra elaborate series of moves that depends on everything working like clockwork. Like say a customs team being a bit overly suspicious.

No, just no.

Can you explain which are the elaborate series of moves that depend on everything working like clockwork?

The RHN used DB's to coordinate/confirm the attack between the RHN and 2nd Fleet.

-1st Fleet DB informs 2nd Fleet that they are in position.
-2nd Fleet DB informs 1st Fleet that attack will commence 12:00 Nouveau Paris Time on the x Day of y Month 1921.
-1st Fleet executes their plan 8h after 2nd Fleet.

Unless the GSN managed to build 150-200 SD(P)'s no one knows about, or the RMN managed to hide 150-200 SD(P)'s in the Home system this is as simple as it gets.

Half the RHN SD(P)'s fleet that the RMN doesn't know about attacks manticore, the other half of the fleet the RMN doesn't know about attacks Trevor's star. It doesn't get much simpler than that, they are not coordinating attacks on 30,40 or 50 systems, they are coordinating an attack on two systems and using the junction that the enemy controls to coordinate their confirm getting to location, and time of launch.

This is a worst case scenario unless the RMN suddenly decides to abandon Marsh and Grendelsbane and both squadrons and the Protector's own are send to Manticore right before

tlb wrote:To repeat what I have said several times before: Oyster Bay was planned and executed so that there was NO EE violation. The book takes care to emphasize this. Debris of an attack falling onto a planet does not count.

Sigs wrote:1) The attacks killed between 20 and 30 million people the vast majority of them civilians without so much as a warning.
2) Accidently killing 8 million people on a planet because you attacked is still a according to the wiki an EE violation. It was avoidable.
3) The people behind OB did NOT control the orbitals or the system, they essentially did a drive by on the orbital infrastructure and one or more of their torpedo's/missiles could have hit the planet, worse they destroyed the infrastructure without taking every reasonable precaution to avoid civilian casualties on the ground...we aren't even going to touch the millions killed in space without warning.

OB might not have been planned as an EE violation but killing 8 million people on a planet sure helps the argument that it was one whether they meant it as a violation or not.

The accidents talked about in the Wiki quote concern a missile or an energy beam impacting a planet. OB was carefully planned so it did not happen. Space junk killing people does not count as an illegal accident in that case. You will find numerous examples of officers from Haven and Manticore worried about a missile flight that might impact a planet; but you will not find any concern that a destroyed structure might impact until after a battle is over. There is nothing in the Edict that protects anything in space, no notice is required.

The requirement to control the orbitals only applies when you intend to bombard the planet as part of a surrender demand. As you read the books you will find examples of drive by destruction of orbitals, for example Haven destroying the structures in orbit at Basilisk. It is considered nice to give warning, so civilians can evacuate; but it is understood that some will not be able to leave and so will die. Note this from Shadow of Saganami, chapter 58:

"Admiral Bourmont," Terekhov faced the visual pickup, his shoulders square, his expression confident, and his voice was icy. "You've called upon my Squadron to surrender. Unfortunately, I can't do that. I came here to do a job—to neutralize the battlecruisers your star nation has been assembling to attack mine. I have not yet completed that task. Two of your battlecruisers remain undamaged, because I refrained from firing upon them in light of their proximity to the civilian portions of your Eroica Station complex. Should any of your armed vessels continue to approach my own command—and we have all of them under surveillance as I speak—I will have no option but to complete my task before withdrawing into hyper before any of your warships can reach me. I regret to say it, but this will require a bombardment of the battlecruisers in question with contact nuclear warheads, and it will be impossible for me to permit the evacuation of your civilian workforce first."

This is from Mission of Honor, chapter 28:

The people who'd planned Oyster Bay had carefully arranged their attack to avoid anything that could be construed as a direct attack on the planetary populations of Manticore or Sphinx. Given the nature of the war they were planning to fight, it wasn't because the MAN had any particular objection to killing as many Manticorans as possible. But there was that bothersome little matter of the Eridani Edict, and while it was probably going to take a while for anyone to figure out who'd carried out the attack, and how, that anonymity wasn't going to last forever. Eventually, the fact that the MAN and its allies were the only people who'd had the technical capability to do it was going to become obvious. There were plans in place to prevent the Manticorans from returning the compliment once they figured out who was to blame, but the Mesan Alignment's diplomatic strategies could be very seriously damaged if anyone figured out too soon how little the Eridani Edict truly meant to it.
That was the real reason the primary destruction of the space stations had been left to the torpedoes, which had overflown the planets, well clear of them. The follow up laser heads had come in on a similar trajectory, but some of the planners had argued against using any of them. Despite all the safeguards built into their guidance systems, there was always the chance, however remote, that one of them was going to ram into the planet at relativistic speeds. And, the critics had pointed out, if that happened, the Alignment's opponents would inevitably claim it had been deliberate.
The final distribution of fire had been a compromise between those who distrusted the torpedoes' ability to do the job and those who wanted no missiles anywhere near either of the inhabited planets. And as was the definition of any compromise, neither side had been completely satisfied.
But however careful they'd been to avoid direct attacks on the planets, none of them had lost any sleep over the possibility of indirect damage from the bits and pieces of wreckage raining down into the planets' gravity wells. That was something totally beyond any attacker's ability to control, and no one could possibly question the fact that the space stations had been legitimate military targets. Under those circumstances, the Eridani Edict's prohibition against deliberate attacks on planetary populations had no bearing. So if a few thousand—or a few hundred thousand—Manties were unfortunate enough to get vaporized when a fifty-thousand-ton chunk of wreckage landed on top of their town, well, making omelettes was always hard on a few eggs.

RFC explains some of the meaning of the Edict in the Pearls at Expanding upon the Eridani Edict.

Final point, no one called it an EE violation when discussing the aftermath. The only time the Edict is mentioned has to do with the requirement to surrender if the attackers had a big enough navy to command the orbitals. Here it is from chapter 30:

"Think about it, Willie," White Haven said. "If someone had anything like the number of capital ships we have, and if all of them had this kind of technology, they wouldn't have had to raid our infrastructure. They could have simply arrived, demonstrated their invisibility, and demanded our surrender, and we wouldn't have had any choice but to give it to them. If they'd gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we'd wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor's Star, for that matter—they'd already have control the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For that matter, they'd've been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defense missiles online to nail them! And even under the Eridani Edict, they'd be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.

Sigs wrote:

TFLYTSNBN wrote:
Don't forget that the GSN had a shit load of BC(P)s.

Can you imagine the tactical as well as strategic surprise when 40+ BC(P)s with the firepower of a dozen SD(P)s crash your party when you attack​ Grayson?

Which Whitehaven said couldn't stand up to Wallers. So destroying the bulk of the SD(P)'s in the opening stages of the war would have been a complete defeat, the GSN's BC(P)'s would not be anywhere near enough to make up for the difference even if the RHN lost half of all attacking forces. Having 65 SD(P)'s and 46 BC(P)'s wouldn't be enough to offset that fact that the Alliance would be outnumbered 2.5-1 in SD(P)'s.

No RMN, no IAN, No Trevor's Star means the war is effectively over. That's assuming the GSN is present at Trevor's Star. If they were a week or two late leaving Grayson the total Alliance Fleet jumps up to 128 SD(P)'s-115 SD(P)'s for the GSN and 13 for the RMN. At that point if the RHN attacks with overwhelming force they can crush 84% of the RMN's SD(P)'s in two separate battles while losing significantly less in the process. Even if the RHN takes 25% casualties in Manticore that would still be almost the equivalent of the entire GSN remaining in orbit.

You need to read WAR OF HONOR. The Protector's Own brought a few BC(P)s to the party when they showed up to support their CO. Weber does not offer details, but it seems obvious that the BC(P)s augmented the offensive fire of the Harringtons. Offensively, a BC(P) equals at least 2/3s of an RHN SD(P) and is very capable against an SD. Defensively; they are considerably inferior. However; when mixed with a fleet of SD(P)s and SDs, it will be difficult to recognize that many of the pods are being launched by the BCs before your fleet gets reamed.

Sigs wrote:The RHN has ~330 SD(P)'s at the start of the war counting the 10 they lost at Marsh. They also have 200 SD's in active service, at the beginning of the war I don't know if the RMN can distinguish between which one is an SD(P) and which one is an SD just through sensors.

They can. This depends on range, of course, but they can easily tell a DuQuesne-class SD from an unknown class. They won't know initially that the unknown, bigger ships (the Sovereigns of Space) are SD(P)s, but they'll know which ones aren't. The range matters, but if you consider that the inner system will be swarming with RDs way before the fleets make contact, there's a good chance they can tell that half the force is of targets-only ships before engagement.

-cut-

No matter how it started, as long as Haven is negotiating in good faith, doesn't start making insane demands, and gives back Trevor's Star to the SKM I can see a long lasting peace coming out of it. True the RMN would be crushed as a force, but they will rebuild with the ships in Grednelsbane and the Home system which Haven wont destroy, so they can be back to 120 SD(P)'s in service and the GSN can be back up to 115 SD(P)'s in service in 24 months as well. I don't see the MA going for a revenge war if the peace treaty is fair to both sides and San Martin is returned.

I agree with that, I just don't think it'll get to that in the first place.

If the RHN massed all its 315 SD(P)s for a surprise attack on the MBS, it might succeed. It has a chance of defeating Home Fleet and 3rd Fleet in detail, like Beatrice later planned to do (and did). Dividing the Havenite forces to attack both the Home Fleet and Third Fleet dilutes the Havenite strength and invites its own defeat in detail, at the expense of Trevor's Star.

Sigs wrote:The primary front is to keep pressure on the alliance so they don't end up freeing ships from Grayson, Manticore and Trevor's Star because the RHN ends up focusing exclusively on defence. The MA wont expose Manticore, Grayson or Trevor's Star but the RHN has to exert pressure on them by having major fleets near Manticore/Grayson and Trevor's Star. Just because they wont fully expose those systems doesn't mean they wont strip ships from them for an operation or two.

For a Hail Mary, I agree. But for anything short of that, stripping the systems bare or practically bare is recklessness. I'm not saying skimming a division or two, but completely stripping. You don't know if an enemy fleet is in position to attack.

I realise this is what you're saying: that Haven needed to maintain some fleets in position to threaten those systems in case they were stripped. But I counter that by saying Haven didn't need to have the fleets in position, only to create reasonable doubt that the fleets could be in position. The MA intelligence can't know for certain that all the 620 SD(P)s are beyond a month's travel from Manticore.

There's also the delay time. Even if all the MA scouts managed to pinpoint 600 SD(P)s, the travel time from those scouts to Trevor's Star is two or three weeks. The reinforced Eighth Fleet would take another four to six weeks to attack its target and get back, releasing the Home Fleet ships back. That's anywhere between 4 to 9 weeks those ships weren't defending the home system, which is more than enough time for the ships that were pinpointed to leave on an attack operation.

And it's worse for Grayson, because you need to add a week or two each way from Trevor's Star to Yeltsin's Star for the DB to call in the ships and for them to get there.

Main front and secondary front are NOT a primarily defensive entities, they primary goal is to tie down the MA's limited ships simply by their close proximity to the MA's main systems. The fleets would be a fleet in being, they cant individually attack Manticore or Grayson but neither can the MA clear them out without exposing one or more of their critical systems.

And even then you don't need a lot of ships. Two or three dozen SD(P)s are more than enough of a menace to keep the Home Fleets where they are, especially when you don't know when they could be suddenly reinforced.

That's also how the RoH shows restraint, they put 150 SD(P)'s in 3 Fleets near the MA's core systems knowing that the MA cant organize a fleet to overwhelm 1 let alone all three of those systems and they cant afford to weaken any of their defences, [...]

There's absolutely no way that Haven had three 150 SD(P) fleets in close proximity to Manticore and/or Trevor's Star, for the simple reason that if they did, Theisman wouldn't have needed to ask permission to start preparations for Beatrice. Those ships would be the preparation. And he wouldn't have attacked with 335 ships, but with 450.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but an ambush fleet covers a specific secondary system, waits in the vicinity of that specific system for the right conditions to execute the ambush, how does it protect a core system if it is a few days to a week away from getting to that system? By the time the system commander sends a request for help, that request gets to the ambush fleet, and that fleet gets to the system in question 8th Fleet would have trashed the systems infrastructure, destroyed the picket and would have been long gone by the time anyone showed up.

Terminology issue here. I'm using secondary and core systems interchangeably here to mean systems like Solon and Lovat, though "core" encompasses both secondary and primary. Primary would be Haven, Bolthole and at most one or two more.

So the ambush fleets don't need to travel. They are already in position. With 500 SD(P)s available, you put 100 in Haven, 100 more in Bolthole, 50 in each of the other two primary systems, you have 200 left for ambush fleets. Giscard's fleet was 4 squadrons strong, or 32 ships only. In that math, you could have 6 different ambush fleets, with enough left overs for decoys. Ditto for four 6-squadron fleets.

And I didn't include any of the older SDs nor the working-up SD(P)s. Those aren't good enough for an attack in the MBS, but they can serve as decoys while they work up and do serve as deterrents.

Or they can go to the inner system which is now apparently undefended and force Grayson to surrender.

The GSN Home Fleet and their ~50-60 SD(P)'s have to protect the industry AND the inner system, this means they have to split in two. Deploying everything to protect one, exposes the other. In your scenario deploying all of Home Fleet to cover Blackbird exposes the inner system and farms that the Protectorate still depends on, so it would be race against time as to who gets to Grayson first, and if the RHN gets there first the GSN is screwed since I doubt they will fire salvos at the RHN if Grayson is backdrop for fear of committing an EE violation against their own people.

More Likely scenario is that the GSN Home Fleet is larger than Manticore's Home Fleet because they have to protect two very important objectives, in Manticore they could temporarily abandon Gryphon without losing all of their industrial capabilities. So the Junction is covered by the forts and Manticore A is covered by Home Fleet with Gryphon getting a lighter task force and fixed defences.

Ok, that's a good point, the Grayson Home Fleet needs to be split between Uriel and the inner system, as neither can be left uncovered. The thing is that each is in position to mutually support the other: should a force drop in on Uriel, a chunk of the inner system force is split off and pins the attacker between two forces. Similarly for someone dropping in the inner system. And if the attacker divides between both, then the ratio is closer to balance.

Plus Blackbird is a military target already, it wouldn't hesitate to use system defence pods, unlike the RMN did during the Battle of Manticore. Fixed defences, like you said.

So they exposed their nation, tied down 40+% of their SD(P)'s on a contingency they had no intention of launching and all of that was done at the time they needed a victory against 8th Fleet to execute Camille. At the very time they needed to increase the odds of catching 8th Fleet they took away a large portion of the SD(P)'s for a contingency.

I disagree on exposing the nation and tying down. Arguments above.

Eighth Fleet had been defeated by 4 squadrons. If they manage to defeat it again with something similar, they'd execute Camille. If Eighth Fleet had been substantially reinforced (which we have to assume they also assumed, so they wouldn't have deployed the exact same ambush force level), they'd go for a stronger response. Which I repeat does not mean Beatrice.

And still, this is the very time they have to do it. If the attack is so strong that they have no choice but to launch Beatrice, that also means they have no time to lose. Having to assemble those forces and train them means you could miss your last chance to win the war.

Beatrice wouldn't take that long if it was an emergency, because if it was an emergency I wouldn't bother training the fleet up, I would gather every ship between Haven and Manticore that I can get go with the time I have till I get to Manticore.

Agreed, which is why it wasn't an emergency. It was a contingency.

Wait, so your theory is to basicly show the MA where your ambush fleets are by sending them in and out of the system a few at a time? I'm sure no one will wonder why the system received 50 SD(P)'s as reinforcement over the last month or two and lost 50 SD(P)'s in reinforcement over the last months or two. The whole point of the RHN's ambush fleets were so that NO ONE in the MA knew they were at the target systems until its too late. Missing 300 SD(P)'s in 6 ambush fleets is significantly better than giving the MA a list of target systems to avoid because they obviously have SD(P)'s near by.

No, that's not what I am saying. I am saying confuse the RDs that should be there, not show your hand. This is just a clever sleight of hand: show a squadron here, a squadron there, to keep ONI from knowing where the full force is. As I said in another post, send some empty fleet trains to the middle of nowhere, pretend to unload, then come back. That way, you can hide the actual fleet trains in the uncertainty. The point is to make ONI believe more systems had ambush forces than there actually were or, alternatively, from knowing which ones did have and which ones didn't.

My point is that those ambush forces have to be out there, hiding, but they can't survive indefinitely without resupply or refit. It's those missions that allow ONI to know where a force is or isn't.

If the scouts had caught wind of even 6 SD(P)'s in system along with CLAC's I doubt 8th Fleet would have visited Solon. The Whole point of an ambush is for the enemy to walk in without expecting you there, because if they know you have an ambush fleet in the system they will either avoid it or find a way to ambush the ambush fleet like they did in Lovat. They could have done that without Apollo if they were willing to take some risks.

I disagree, for two reasons. One, Eighth Fleet can take on 6 SD(P)s and a few CLACs. Second, there are probably several systems with that force-level visible, which means Eighth Fleet would have no targets it sees no defenders at all. It has to choose one to attack. The real trick here is how you choose: how do you determine that those 6 SD(P)s are all that the system has to defend and haven't been reinforced in the two months since the scout last visited the system?

As long as there were enough Ambush fleets to increase the chance of catching 8th Fleet in one, and the enemy(MA) didn't know where they are. If the RHN had 5 Ambush Fleets and their 240 SD(P)'s and 60 CLAC's and then they took aside 240 SD(P)'s and 16 CLAC's for a contingency operation they didn't plan on executing that leaves 40 SD(P)'s fully operational for defence of the republic and 100 SD(P)'s working up. Don't know about you but I doubt the MA will miss that 92%+ of the RHN's SD(P) have suddenly gone missing and Capital Fleet can be knocked off by 40 Alliance SD(P)'s. So either the ambush fleets were reduced in number to a point where the RHN would have been exceptionally lucky to catch 8th Fleet and 8th Fleet would have had to be exceptionally unlucky to step inside a trap or they stripped every important objective and set themselves up for failure.

Yes, I would. The whole point of an ambush fleet is to remain hidden. So the fact that the MA can't find the ships doesn't mean they aren't there. They could be elsewhere.

I'm arguing that working up to Beatrice and preparing ambush fleets are not mutually exclusive options. But even if they are, Eighth Fleet's target list was shrinking, since they were going for bigger and more important targets every time. Turning around and trashing a tertiary system doesn't help the war effort -- does, in fact, hinder it, because it cedes the initiative. So Sanskrit would launch an attack on a system that was at least on the same level as Solon, with a higher likelihood for those more important.

The meeting happened in April 1921, the plan for Beatrice was probably for at least June-Sept 1921, so he was talking about ships they would have AT THE TIME of the planned attack not at the time of the conversation. I would hope that the CNO knows exactly when he would get ships, how long it takes to work them up and when he expects them to be operational. If he doesn't he is a shitty CNO.

So you're saying that the RHN added 400 ships between March and June 1921? And they didn't need working up?

TFLYTSNBN wrote:Don't forget that the GSN had a shit load of BC(P)s.

Can you imagine the tactical as well as strategic surprise when 40+ BC(P)s with the firepower of two dozen+ SD(P)s crash your party when you attack​ Grayson?

And the Katanas. Thunderbolt was the first time they saw action, so discovering that the brand, new RHN LACs are no match for a space superiority LAC that they didn't know existed would count as a huge surprise too.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:You need to read WAR OF HONOR. The Protector's Own brought a few BC(P)s to the party when they showed up to support their CO. Weber does not offer details, but it seems obvious that the BC(P)s augmented the offensive fire of the Harringtons. Offensively, a BC(P) equals at least 2/3s of an RHN SD(P) and is very capable against an SD. Defensively; they are considerably inferior. However; when mixed with a fleet of SD(P)s and SDs, it will be difficult to recognize that many of the pods are being launched by the BCs before your fleet gets reamed.

BC(P)s work noticeably better against SDs if you load anti-SD missiles instead of anti-cruiser missiles. This seems obvious, but it seems to confuse the RMN.

Sigs wrote:Can you explain which are the elaborate series of moves that depend on everything working like clockwork?

This one:

The RHN used DB's to coordinate/confirm the attack between the RHN and 2nd Fleet.

-1st Fleet DB informs 2nd Fleet that they are in position.
-2nd Fleet DB informs 1st Fleet that attack will commence 12:00 Nouveau Paris Time on the x Day of y Month 1921.
-1st Fleet executes their plan 8h after 2nd Fleet.

This is the Two Generals problem. What happens if the second DB never makes it through? Then one fleet moves and the second doesn't, so they won't have mutual support. Defeat in detail.

What happens if the DBs do make through but there's a problem with one of them launching the attack and they're delayed? What happens if they're discovered and have to launch early?

What happens if the defenders on one of the sides are unexpectedly stronger? For example, they got reinforced by the GSN against the RMN's wishes. Does the force that faces the unexpected opposition continue to its doom just so the other force has a chance of success? Because it can't withdraw.

SVW was quite clear that you don't launch multiple, simultaneous attacks that depend on tying up forces so one can't come and attack you in the rear.

Unless the GSN managed to build 150-200 SD(P)'s no one knows about, or the RMN managed to hide 150-200 SD(P)'s in the Home system this is as simple as it gets.

Half the RHN SD(P)'s fleet that the RMN doesn't know about attacks manticore, the other half of the fleet the RMN doesn't know about attacks Trevor's star. It doesn't get much simpler than that, they are not coordinating attacks on 30,40 or 50 systems, they are coordinating an attack on two systems and using the junction that the enemy controls to coordinate their confirm getting to location, and time of launch.

Except that the enemy controls the Junction, so you can't be sure that the critical messages do get through.

For this to succeed, you have to plan as if they were completely independent attacks, with no communication and no dependency. They need to both succeed on their own against the full forces of both systems (because the enemy does control the Junction, so their messages and ship traffic do get through) or be able to withdraw if the opposition is too big without compromising the other attack.

tlb wrote:Here it is from chapter 30:

"Think about it, Willie," White Haven said. "If someone had anything like the number of capital ships we have, and if all of them had this kind of technology, they wouldn't have had to raid our infrastructure. They could have simply arrived, demonstrated their invisibility, and demanded our surrender, and we wouldn't have had any choice but to give it to them. If they'd gotten a couple of dozen capital ships with this new drive of theirs as far in-system as they got their pods before launch, what other option would we have had? Even if we'd wanted to bring in Home Fleet—every single ship at Trevor's Star, for that matter—they'd already have control the planetary orbitals long before we could get into position. For that matter, they'd've been into missile range of the planets before we could even bring the system-defense missiles online to nail them! And even under the Eridani Edict, they'd be fully justified in bombarding the planets if we refused to surrender under those circumstances. But instead of going for the jugular, they attacked our arms and legs.

This goes against what we discussed about what it means to "control the orbitals." White Haven is saying that if someone decloaks in orbit and, presumably, destroys the orbital defences, they can demand the surrender under the threat of bombarding, even if Home Fleet is an hour away and Third Fleet is 3 hours.