So....imagine you are Admiral Parnell's staff officer

locarno24 wrote:

At any rate, I never understood, if Haven wanted a short victorious war, why they didn't just go for the heart. How the heck can any journey to the center of Manticore be shorter with time consuming concentric circles on the periphery instead of boring straight in.

Especially given their prior strategic doctrine of short, sharp shock assault. As noted, it would represent the biggest concentration of force they'd ever have to face but it's one of those situations where I'm not sure anything you can do makes it dramatically better.

Hindsight is 20/20. But then, in 1901-1905, NO ONE had ever done what we're talking about here. And especially since it's not just "biggest concentration of force they'd ever have to face", but the biggest concentration of force that anyone had ever had to face, anywhere. It's understandable that they would be reticent to launch that attack.

Wars and strategy were also set in stone for centuries. The only doctrine that was acceptable was that of the SLN and as David explained in HoS, the PRN adopted with without being the SLN. The SLN could afford to go to war for each target, suffer however many losses were required because its supply of SDs in the Battle Fleet was for all intents and purposes inexhaustible.

Wars were always fought advancing territory little by little, securing your supply chains and logistics, creating advanced bases to shorten command and control. No one did deep-penetration attacks. Call them unimaginative, but it simply didn't occur to them.

No one had fought 300+ of the wall. In fact, if the PRN had attacked with 400+ of their own of the wall, that battle would have been bigger than the actual Battle of Manticore 16 years later, in tonnage, number of hulls, and probably personnel. So aside from the Second Battle of Manticore, which no one with a sane mind and full possession of facts would have fought (and Filareta decided not to), there has never even been an SD concentration as big. There has been no battle that has caused as much destruction and killed as many spacers as the direct invasion of Manticore in 1904 would have caused.

So, no, a direct invasion of Manticore-A was out of the cards. Defeat in detail of the RMN, through strategy, was the only sensible solution. Not necessarily a winning solution, but the only one sensible people would have come to.

locarno24 wrote:Unlike Grayson forts, with ~ 100g acceleration, you're not going to kill them by pratting about with ballistic launches, for example, and each one is implied to have be of DN/SDN level combat power.

They don't have compensators, so they are limited to like 30-50g, but it's enough. Each of these is supposed to be equivalent to multiple SDs in combat firepower.


In my opinion, the Junction is a sideshow. If you capture Manticore, by putting a fleet in orbit and inviting the Queen to surrender, the war is OVER. You win, you own the junction no matter how shot up your fleet is.

Even if you "just" ravage the orbital industrial bases and have to retreat because you can't actually take Manticore in the face of reinforcements you sorta win. You have made it impossible for Manticore to fight on because on you still have forces and are building more, and Manticore can't even build more missiles. I'm not certain what would happen then, but I really doubt it will have the entire surviving RMN being bodily flung at Haven. So you can go gobble up the rest of the Manticoran Alliance.

If you own the junction and get your fleet shot up in the process you don't win. The war isn't over, you have not touched the core of Manticoran military power or their production capability. You just own the junction. That does help the finance issues and is certainly not good for Manticore, but how are you planning on holding something 12 light hours away from the entire RMN?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:So, no, a direct invasion of Manticore-A was out of the cards. Defeat in detail of the RMN, through strategy, was the only sensible solution. Not necessarily a winning solution, but the only one sensible people would have come to.

It's not a winning strategy. That's the issue. The odds that the Queen will figure out a way to drag in the SLN or the IAN if Manticore is slowly but steadily being ground down is not insignificant. The Junction is worth a LOT, and there are very few options that are objectively worse than being governed by Haven as a conquered system.

Particularly to the people running Manticore, who are likely to be taken out and summarily shot by Haven along with their families.

kzt wrote:In my opinion, the Junction is a sideshow. If you capture Manticore, by putting a fleet in orbit and inviting the Queen to surrender, the war is OVER. You win, you own the junction no matter how shot up your fleet is.

Even if you "just" ravage the orbital industrial bases and have to retreat because you can't actually take Manticore in the face of reinforcements you sorta win. You have made it impossible for Manticore to fight on because on you still have forces and are building more, and Manticore can't even build more missiles. I'm not certain what would happen then, but I really doubt it will have the entire surviving RMN being bodily flung at Haven. So you can go gobble up the rest of the Manticoran Alliance.

Agreed. If that were to happen, Manticore would go for the Get Out of Hell plan and call in two squadrons of SDs from Beowulf, to cover either the junction or Manticore (if the PRN had to retreat). Haven would think several times before firing on Solarian ships.

If you own the junction and get your fleet shot up in the process you don't win. The war isn't over, you have not touched the core of Manticoran military power or their production capability. You just own the junction. That does help the finance issues and is certainly not good for Manticore, but how are you planning on holding something 12 light hours away from the entire RMN?

It's actually closer in real-space to PRH territory, through the Trevor's Star terminus.

But what would they bring? To destroy the forts, the PRN would have had to bring everything from Trevor's Star and from Barnett. Not only could the RMN retake the Junction with almost intact forces, they could also liberate Trevor's Star much sooner than what actually happened.

Another point in Parnell's mind is that after Basilisk, he actually had very good sensor data of the RMN Home Fleet. His "visiting" fleet spent some time in close proximity to some of the newest and most powerful SDs in existence, with military grade sensors. One assumes they'd inserted other Q-ships into the Manticore Binary System to take readings before, but even a mere lieutenant commander skippering a destroyer would have warned off a merchant freighter or dispatch boat that came too close to Home Fleet.

The only responsible thing to do at that point would be to study the data, a treasure trove that fell on his lap. If nothing else, they needed to know what weaknesses they could discern on Manticoran. And since the Havenite education system had been crumbling for decades, they probably needed to rely on Solarian contacts, which lengthened the time it took to get any conclusions back (and fed data to the Alignment).

So what happened was that in 1902 and 1903, they studied the data and got a shocker. That led to operations like Operation Jericho to deny Grayson to the Alliance, while they tried to catch up and figure out what to do.

And after an RMN heavy cruiser took out a PN battlecruiser and an RMN destroyer took out several Masadan CLs and DDs, they realised they couldn't wait any longer.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And after an RMN heavy cruiser took out a PN battlecruiser and an RMN destroyer took out several Masadan CLs and DDs, they realised they couldn't wait any longer.

The loss of the PNS Breslau was due to a totally incompetent and overconfident captain combined with the minimal training of the crew.

Nike could have similarly killed White Haven's Reliant if it was run the same way.

kzt wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And after an RMN heavy cruiser took out a PN battlecruiser and an RMN destroyer took out several Masadan CLs and DDs, they realised they couldn't wait any longer.

The loss of the PNS Breslau was due to a totally incompetent and overconfident captain combined with the minimal training of the crew.

Nike could have similarly killed White Haven's Reliant if it was run the same way.

Sure, the Masadan inexperienced crew was the reason both the Battle of Blackbird and Second Yeltsin were lost. And the quality of the Masadan ships was likely the reason Madrigal killed so many MN ships during First Yeltsin.

But an RMN destroyer surviving long enough to put out that much damage against a PN BC, PN DD and several MN CLs and DDs must have given them pause. And even though Theisman was sent home without detailed sensor recordings, the PN knew exactly how good the MN ships were. He could also tell how quickly HMS Apollo transited from Yeltsin to Manticore.

There was a lot of things to point out the RMN superiority. Any one or two could probably be dismissed. Unlike Rajampet, Parnell must definitely have not rejected them. He still was a product of his training and had a lot of blinders on, but avoiding conflict simply wasn't possible any more.

locarno24 wrote:That said in turn: based on Honour Among Enemies, we know 31 fortresses is "a quarter of the entire Junction Defence Force" and that 50 PN battleships (admittedly with the benefit of surprise in presumably energy weapon engagements) were able to kill that many before being wiped out, presumably by the concentrated fire of the full 120-odd fortresses.

Though IIRC David said later that the simulation that was based on was both pre-laserhead (making the forts a much nastier proposition to break into range of) and overly favorable to the hypothetical attackers.

So in practice if such an attack had been made - especially made after the Junction forts got, and adjusted their tactics for, laserheads - it likely would have utterly failed.

kzt wrote:No you don't.

If you take Manticore nothing else matters. The RMN will be ordered to stand down, the odds that they are all going to decide to kamikaze themselves with a destructive act of piracy seems unlikely. And you will hunt them down and kill them if they do, and anyone who helps pirates will get stomped.

You can recover any systems that revolt. You can repair any damaged yards with the superior RMN tech.

And who is going to attack the Peeps? The only MA Navy with SDs is the RMN. And there isn't going to be a lot of them left once you get done with them and the odds that they will choose that two week window when they have a chance is very small. After all, they haven't done it yet and they have been poked at for years.

I agree that holding down restive systems is a false economy when it costs you the mobile naval forces needed to win the war. As you said you can always recapture them afterwards.

Also I wonder if those systems would be quite so likely to revolt before the Coup against the Legislaturalist. Robspierre threw away the mantel of legitimacy and that probably increased the likelihood of a restive system actually trying to break away. (Though extra ground forces with just a couple DDs to provide orbital bombardment would probably go a long way to discouraging systems from trying to go their own way -- at least not without external naval help. And if an RMN raid does let a system revolt -- well, we're back to your original point that you can recapture it later once the war is won).

So a rationalization of defensive needs should free up significant forces. It's just Haven never went up against anybody that required them to take major risks and uncover even tertiary systems in order to have the forces to go on the offensive - so they're being overcautious.

munroburton wrote:Hell, that's where they went wrong in the first place - a complicated scheme to assassinate Roger III at the same time they invaded Trevor's Star. Fighting Manticore would have been much easier for the PRH back then.

But it wouldn't have been fighting Manticore. It would have been fighting Manticore and San Martin (who was no slouch), with the Trevor's Star terminus in San Martino hands so the Manticore-San Martin alliance could strike deep into Havenite territory pretty easily.

drothgery wrote:But it wouldn't have been fighting Manticore. It would have been fighting Manticore and San Martin (who was no slouch), with the Trevor's Star terminus in San Martino hands so the Manticore-San Martin alliance could strike deep into Havenite territory pretty easily.

It took under a day for them to take San Martin IIRC. Basically, if you don't have force already in the system or at least ready to go at the junction you are not going to influence the outcome. At worst you get destroyed in detail by the peeps sitting at the terminus.

And it really doesn't matter what someone without multiple SD squadrons thinks about Haven, they can't really hurt Haven. And Haven can squash them like a bug when they get around to it.