Solarian Military Catchup Attempts

fallsfromtrees wrote:

kzt wrote:As opposed to those gripping space battles we have now, where one side casually mows down their helpless opponents?

What we are getting now is getting close to what RFC refers to a war porn, so no, not the gripping space battles we have now.

I wonder - if the battles are going to remain so one-sided, RFC could avoid war porn by lovingly detailing the sympathetic characters of the victims and then executing them. Byng, Crandall, and Filareta have not been sympathetic characters (putting it mildly), and the people around them have for the most part not been much better.

We could get a real downer ending that way though.

But a story where one side does to ground as thoroughly as the MAlign has done so far, and then stays hidden for 2000 years, giving no indication that they are there, and so giving no clues as to how they might be found is going to make for a lack of story telling opportunities.

Yes. One option there is simply not telling that story - life is short, RFC doesn't have prolong, and he's got Safehold to wrap up too and a whole lot of Norfressan novels planned. Another is to let some senior members of the RF "do a Theisman" on the core of the MA onion and let the RF go on as simply one among many peaceful, law-abiding SL successor states, perhaps with an eye toward rehabilitating transhumanism gradually.

lyonheart wrote:Hi Valen123456,

It sounds like you're proposing Victor and Allison team up to identify and snip out the RF leaders etc.

That might be a very interesting scenario for more stories about Victor, but Thandi might have some objections...

Actually that particular thought never crossed my mind, although now you mention it Allison would definatly have some fun making Victor squirm ... and Thandi would probably enjoy watching the little humiliation.

One of the major problems the Rf will have is demonstrating they could stop the GA if they had to; since they can't without at least the Lenny Det's, recruiting will not match MAlign targets for some time if ever.

Actually I am inclined to think that the calming/persuasion power of the whole Spider fleet concept has now been blown. How would you feel as an independent star system looking to the Factor for comfort feel if you learned about the Spider, and have also heard all about Manticoran claims of an invisible starship force attacking their infrastructure without following any of the established codes of military warfare? Especially since this attack does seem to have stopped their ability to blow whole Solarian battle fleets away with barely any looses on their own side.

This doesn't mean the Spider fleets cannot be a terror as a commerce raiding force designed to make reluctant planets feel more inclined to join the Factor, but this sort of upfrontedly stupid technique would definitely allow all sides to start closing in on the Alignment.

Valen123456 wrote:

lyonheart wrote:Hi Valen123456,

It sounds like you're proposing Victor and Allison team up to identify and snip out the RF leaders etc.

That might be a very interesting scenario for more stories about Victor, but Thandi might have some objections...

Actually that particular thought never crossed my mind, although now you mention it Allison would definatly have some fun making Victor squirm ... and Thandi would probably enjoy watching the little humiliation.


---------------

Actually, Allison, Thandi and Ginny would make a good tag-team.....

-- Stewart

I'll drop in my two bits and try to stick to the original posting. Feel free to comment or nuke it from orbit...

The top of the SLN seems to have realized that Battle Fleet's current ships, especially the reserves, are basically worthless as anything other than source of parts and materials. As of the end of ART they seem to be stumbling, 'aided' by the MA, towards more BC based strategies while R&D tries to play catchup with the SEM. Whether BC strategies, particularly against SEM-held or -allied systems, would work is IMO open to conjecture (LAC groups).

I've got some assumptions about what the SLN, and particularly BF really does know about SEM and havenite weaponry and ships as of the end of ART. In particular I'm thinking about generally accepted knowledge, not what 'crackpots' like al-Fanudahi might think.

- The SLN doesn't know about the Mk 16's full range and capabilites. At Zunker they were fired from 30M km. Monica and New Tuscany reports seem to be discounted or assume external pods were used.

- The SLN thinks dual drive missiles are large enough to require pods. IIRC Technodyne has only released the Trebuchet MDM to the SLN.

- The SLN has not thought about internal pod carriage. The time mantie pods were used against them, they were prelaid or externally carried. Their own pods are external-only.

- The SLN doesn't know about modern LAC offensive capabilities. They were shown to Filareta at second Manticore in the defense but not in the strike role. They should realize that CLACs exist though.

- The SLN knows the SEM has working FTL comm and has crunched it down to fit in recon platforms. See the Hermes bouys at second Manticore.

- The SLN hasn't a clue about SEM and havenite ship manning requirements.

- The SLN doesn't know about Keyhole, much less Apollo.

What I'm wondering is, if someone in the SLN does start thinking about whether pods can be carried inside warships, will they think that the Nikes are podlayers? After all, if podlayers exist then the manties would have had a reason to build BCs that big, beyond pride, intimidation factor or megalomania.

It might actually be an interesting story to see al-Fanudahi try to run a design study to try to draw up rough capability requirements or even plans for a 'next generation' BC or SD and assuming that al-Fanudahi has thought about internal pod carriage (maybe basing his thinking on fleet minelayers?). For the SD they might actually get something like an early Medusa (as of operation Buttercup) or maybe an early Sovereign of Space. Problems fitting enough SLN pods in a Nike-sized hull might lead al-Fanudahi to realize mantie missiles have to be quite a bit smaller than SLN ones (i.e. at the scarier end of his own 'radical' capability projections).

I'm not sure whether such a design study would be run as an 'against the fall of night' crash program or if it would be bureaucratic infighting as usual. There seem to be people at the top of the SLN who realise the former might (or should) be the case.

Comments?

There is a huge amount of data on the first war and operation Buttercup. What do officers how have been beached do? They write books and articles about their wartime experiences.

The BoM occurred inside the Manticore home system. What is the Manticore position on press freedom? I can pretty much assure you that there is more then one newssource that has some very accurate sources about exactly what happened, at what ranges and when. Then there would have been the investigations afterwards, which would have been covered intensely given that about a million RMN members were killed in the fight.

kzt wrote:There is a huge amount of data on the first war and operation Buttercup. What do officers how have been beached do? They write books and articles about their wartime experiences.

The BoM occurred inside the Manticore home system. What is the Manticore position on press freedom? I can pretty much assure you that there is more then one newssource that has some very accurate sources about exactly what happened, at what ranges and when. Then there would have been the investigations afterwards, which would have been covered intensely given that about a million RMN members were killed in the fight.

Good points, kzt. The difficulty so far has been that you have to have people in positions of responsibility with IQs larger than their shoe size gather that info, collate it and then plan accordingly. We haven't seen much of that so far...

Don

n7axw wrote:

kzt wrote:There is a huge amount of data on the first war and operation Buttercup. What do officers how have been beached do? They write books and articles about their wartime experiences.

The BoM occurred inside the Manticore home system. What is the Manticore position on press freedom? I can pretty much assure you that there is more then one newssource that has some very accurate sources about exactly what happened, at what ranges and when. Then there would have been the investigations afterwards, which would have been covered intensely given that about a million RMN members were killed in the fight.

Good points, kzt. The difficulty so far has been that you have to have people in positions of responsibility with IQs larger than their shoe size gather that info, collate it and then plan accordingly. We haven't seen much of that so far...

Don

With some limitations, of course. I'd hope those beached officers wouldn't be writing books explaining the MDM's baffles and the technical details of how FTL comms, beta squared nodes, etc. work, however much they may write about punching out entire task groups with tens of thousands of missiles launched at 60 million kilometres.

As for collected intelligence, it's obvious that al-Fanudahi(and Teague) is sitting on a great deal of information they simply can't pass up the chain yet, because it won't even be believed. Unlike the careerists, al-Fanudahi is planning for the future by refusing to allow his colleague to share the official responsibility. The way may now be clear for them to provide their trove of information to those who have no choice but to accept it now.

Also, Lieutenant Maitland Askew wrote A Preliminary Appreciation of Potential Technology Advances of the Royal Manticoran Navy, which got him thrown off Byng's flagship. The SLN has always had most of the information it needed; just never bothered to use it properly, due to hubris.

Manticore has been at war for nearly 20 years. During that time she became quite good at keeping things black. I rather doubt that is going to change. Beached officers and books not withstanding, I doubt that anyone is going to come up with enough info to allow duplication of Manticore's efforts. They will have to figure it out for themselves and while not impossible, that is going to take lots of time.

Don

n7axw wrote:Manticore has been at war for nearly 20 years. During that time she became quite good at keeping things black. I rather doubt that is going to change. Beached officers and books not withstanding, I doubt that anyone is going to come up with enough info to allow duplication of Manticore's efforts. They will have to figure it out for themselves and while not impossible, that is going to take lots of time.

Don

Much of the interesting stuff would still be covered by the Official Secrets Act, which means publishing it could be considered an act of treason.

ErikM wrote:I'll drop in my two bits and try to stick to the original posting. Feel free to comment or nuke it from orbit...

The top of the SLN seems to have realized that Battle Fleet's current ships, especially the reserves, are basically worthless as anything other than source of parts and materials. As of the end of ART they seem to be stumbling, 'aided' by the MA, towards more BC based strategies while R&D tries to play catchup with the SEM. Whether BC strategies, particularly against SEM-held or -allied systems, would work is IMO open to conjecture (LAC groups).

I've got some assumptions about what the SLN, and particularly BF really does know about SEM and havenite weaponry and ships as of the end of ART. In particular I'm thinking about generally accepted knowledge, not what 'crackpots' like al-Fanudahi might think.

- The SLN doesn't know about the Mk 16's full range and capabilites. At Zunker they were fired from 30M km. Monica and New Tuscany reports seem to be discounted or assume external pods were used.

- The SLN thinks dual drive missiles are large enough to require pods. IIRC Technodyne has only released the Trebuchet MDM to the SLN.

- The SLN has not thought about internal pod carriage. The time mantie pods were used against them, they were prelaid or externally carried. Their own pods are external-only.

- The SLN doesn't know about modern LAC offensive capabilities. They were shown to Filareta at second Manticore in the defense but not in the strike role. They should realize that CLACs exist though.

- The SLN knows the SEM has working FTL comm and has crunched it down to fit in recon platforms. See the Hermes bouys at second Manticore.

- The SLN hasn't a clue about SEM and havenite ship manning requirements.

- The SLN doesn't know about Keyhole, much less Apollo.

What I'm wondering is, if someone in the SLN does start thinking about whether pods can be carried inside warships, will they think that the Nikes are podlayers? After all, if podlayers exist then the manties would have had a reason to build BCs that big, beyond pride, intimidation factor or megalomania.

It might actually be an interesting story to see al-Fanudahi try to run a design study to try to draw up rough capability requirements or even plans for a 'next generation' BC or SD and assuming that al-Fanudahi has thought about internal pod carriage (maybe basing his thinking on fleet minelayers?). For the SD they might actually get something like an early Medusa (as of operation Buttercup) or maybe an early Sovereign of Space. Problems fitting enough SLN pods in a Nike-sized hull might lead al-Fanudahi to realize mantie missiles have to be quite a bit smaller than SLN ones (i.e. at the scarier end of his own 'radical' capability projections).

I'm not sure whether such a design study would be run as an 'against the fall of night' crash program or if it would be bureaucratic infighting as usual. There seem to be people at the top of the SLN who realise the former might (or should) be the case.

Comments?

It's not clear how much information from second Manticore actually made it back to the SLN. Since a state of war now exists between Manticore and the SL, any SLN survivors of second Manticore are now prisoners of war, and the SLN will not have been able to debrief them. The SLN does know about the FTL comms, as they have been used by Manticore on multiple occasions, and sometimes the SLN officer who saw it, actually survived to tell the tale. Not clear they have any knowledge of LACs, since so far, LACs were only used against them at second Manticore, so any information would have come from observers looking the ware between Haven and Manticore, and the SLN wasn't interested in a couple of neo-barb nations beating on each other. They probably regard any information about them as grossly exaggerated, and therefore not to be believed. Which means they are in for a very rude awakening the first time a BC gets ambushed by a squadron of LACs. It may actually take a number of times, before a BC survives long enough to get home to complain about the LAC of information about them.