Would Dispersing Shipyards Blunt or Stop a Second Oyster Bay

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
The SEM was at war with the other power backing Torch. There was no way to keep the survey expedition a secret: you can't survey in the Congo System without the Torch Government knowing about it (not if you still want their trust) and you can't keep the Havenite government from knowing about it since they were also part of that government. Namely (literally!) Victor Cachat.

Here is what you said to my point that the RF/MA had to be picketing the system from the get go:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Sorry, there are two problems with that argument: "consistently" and "good chunk". The Mannerheim picket of The Twins was neither consistent nor a good chunk of the fleet. It was a squadron of BCs and we know Mannerheim had an outsized Navy, so I expect this means a dozen or two SDs. And it was deployed only around the time the Harvest Joy was expected to transit. The transit was well-publicised, so the MAlign and Mannerheim had enough notice to know to deploy the special squadron, with trustworthy crews. No one is going to transit a wormhole they don't have navigational data for, so there was no danger before the Harvest Joy.

Having 8 BCs disappear for a bit of time is no big deal. You tell the galaxy that it's exercise manoeuvres and you hide the squadron's deployment in an actual, larger exercise of your fleet. Benjamin got away with it twice with the Protector's Own. The crews themselves have to be somewhat trustworthy: as I said, they know about the wormhole and that it is a secret, but they just don't know the real reason why.

But you're right that that third shift impeller tech may brag at a bar and cause the intelligence services to find out what really happened to the Harvest Joy. The problem is only that right now the GA and the SL have no reason to suspect Mannerheim and the RF are connected to the MAlign.

My point was and still is that the Havest Joy could have surveyd the system without much fanfair or even secretly for any number of reasons. Which means that the RF only picketing the system when Harvest Joy transits would be risky because if Manticore decides to keep it quiet for whatever reason the system is uncovered during the survey. If Manticore/Torch releases the information after Harvest Joy transits the terminus it is too late for the RF to picket the system. The RF HAD to picket the system from shortly after Verda Vista fell because they simply could not count that they will get heads up about a survey mission or at least enough heads up to properly defend the space.

You are condemning them for failing to make an assumption based on facts they had not yet had. In other words, you're expecting them to be omniscient or at least clairvoyant.

They did not know the WHY. They should not guess the success of the mission if they don't know the WHY. They said that the MA has limited resources because they didn't destroy all the infrastructure in the HS, Trevors Star and the Andermani Empire not to mention leaving Home Fleet(RMN and GSN) as well as 3rd Fleet and forts. If they don't know the WHY they should not be guessing on the success of the mission. OB could have been an insane success or a complete failure depending on what the goal was.

You can only make decisions based on the facts you do have.

And in the books, the characters said screw the facts Ima assume a whole bunch of things.

You cannot make decisions based on pie-in-the-sky wild guesses

That is what they did in the book. They didn't know what exactly the MA was targeting so they made a guess that they did not have enough ships to target everything so they didn't have a lot of ships. There was no evidence that the MA wanted to destroy anything else, and they might have wanted not to send more ships simply because of the added risk of detection. If the MA had 1,000 Shark Class ships and 500 LD's but only felt the need to send 28 on the mission because that was enough the characters in the book would have been dangerously wrong.

Mannerheim had one of the biggest SDFs in the League, so making a couple of squadrons of BCs disappear from the public eye shouldn't be too difficult.

One of the biggest in the RF, not the League and not the Galaxy. That could mean they had 5 Squadrons of SD's and 10 Squadrons of BC's, consistently missing 10% of your BC force as a single system navy would raise questions if someone starts looking. There is an upper limit for a fleet that the MSDF can have without looking suspicious, imagine the MSDF being disproportionately large for all potential threats in their region.

If we assume they had two dozen SDs, then they probably had at least 4 times as many BCs.

Missing 15% of your BC's consistently for 4 years will definitely raise questions especially since the "secret mission" started suspiciously right after Congo was captured. So between Congo's capture and the RF forming there were ~4 years, which means that if we take your fleet estimate as the real numbers they would have to have rotated 66% of their BC's through the system picket. That is 32 BC's and 48,000+ people included are the 12,000 people and 8 BC's that were there for the destruction of the Harvest Joy.

At any point in time, half of them are deployed somewhere, the rest either in their Home Fleet or laid up for refit and maintenance. And there are thousands of BCs flying around, so the MA could certainly slip Mannerheim a few more from Darius using those shipyards you argued they must have had. A bit of creative accounting by an MA plant in the Mannerheim Navy and no one knows their actual force strength.

If Darius is producing ships for the MSDF I doubt they would be the once that are unaccounted for, they would definitely not be drawing any attention on them by making them obviously in the fleet but not accounted for, because that's how people start asking silly little questions like why do you have 48 BC's and you cant keep track of them? I mean you can probably slip and entire 10-15 squadrons of BC's in the SLN and no one will notice but when you have 48 BC's you cant really use creative accounting to hide 15% of your force. It works if all RF fleets had a secret portion that no one but the MA and very senior and trusted members knew about.

Sigs wrote:Or you get evidence that MSDF was picketing a top secret WH and on or about x day of x month in 1921 they were engaged in a “battle” and destroyed an unknown/pirate ship that was transiting the wormhole. You get this information from one of the 16,000 people on board those 8 ships. Start more in depth investigation and find out that MSDF BC’s have disappear for 12 month deployments since Torch declared independence. At that point the GA intelligence services have their breadcrumbs and they focus on the RF because it becomes more likely and more likely that they worked with Manpower to hide where the Torch WH goes.

Well, the plot for the last 10-15 years is full of this stuff. Take Maya. So in a fight with a Mesa fleet the SLN lost multiple vessels. No big deal.

Uh, really?

When was the last time the SLN fought a fleet action? This was from Mesa? When was the last time the SLN lost multiple ships in the same action? Remember that bit about how the officer class of the SLN is largely a multi-generational family thing? How many SLN flag officers just had a grand-kid get killed or maimed?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:At any point in time, half of them are deployed somewhere, the rest either in their Home Fleet or laid up for refit and maintenance. And there are thousands of BCs flying around, so the MA could certainly slip Mannerheim a few more from Darius using those shipyards you argued they must have had. A bit of creative accounting by an MA plant in the Mannerheim Navy and no one knows their actual force strength.

Sigs wrote: If Darius is producing ships for the MSDF I doubt they would be the once that are unaccounted for, they would definitely not be drawing any attention on them by making them obviously in the fleet but not accounted for, because that's how people start asking silly little questions like why do you have 48 BC's and you cant keep track of them? I mean you can probably slip and entire 10-15 squadrons of BC's in the SLN and no one will notice but when you have 48 BC's you cant really use creative accounting to hide 15% of your force. It works if all RF fleets had a secret portion that no one but the MA and very senior and trusted members knew about.

I very much doubt that Darius is supplying Mannerheim with any ships; that would be too hard to keep secret. Also the force picketing the wormhole end that destroyed Harvest Joy is not "off the books"; the Mannerheim officer corps knows a reason for the top secret picketing (but only the star line officers know the true reason. From Torch of Freedom, chapter 50:

All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines. Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.

<snip>

And Hasselberg had a perfectly valid point about Ganneau's actions. They were covered by his orders, even though Trajan knew Ganneau had been expected to use his own discretion about employing lethal force. And there were arguments in favor of exactly what the commodore had done. Trajan might not like them very much, but he couldn't deny their existence. The reason Ganneau's squadron had drawn the duty of watching the Alignment's end of the Verdant Vista Bridge in the first place was that judicious personnel assignments similar to those which had been tweaked in Task Force Four's favor had led—purely coincidentally, of course—to the Sixth Battlecruiser Squadron's being exclusively officered and manned by what happened to be Mesan star-lines. None of them were going to mention what had happened to anyone else, but if a Manticoran survey vessel had been brought in by vessels of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force . . 

<snip>

In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was concerned, however, Mannerheim had discovered the junction only eight and a half T-years ago, and the decision had been taken to keep its existence a secret because it had only two secondary termini . . . and because the Republic intended to make sure that when its existence became generally known, it was also firmly established as belonging to Mannerheim. Fortuitously, from the Alignment's perspective, establishing that ownership was going to be complicated and (even better) time-consuming. Useless as the Felix System had turned out to be, colonization rights to it had been purchased by a Solarian corporation better than five hundred T-years ago. Since then, they had passed through the hands of at least a dozen levels of speculators—always trading downward, once the newest owner discovered how difficult it would have been to attract colonists to the system when there were so many other, more attractive potential destinations. By now, there were actually four separate corporations which claimed ownership, and none of them were likely to relinquish their claims without seeking at least some compensation to write off against their bad debt. If Mannerheim suddenly showed an interest in the system, someone was going to wonder why. Aside from the Jessyk survey (which had been poaching on someone else's property, not that one would have expected that consideration to weigh heavily with Jessyk, of course), no one had ever bothered to update the original survey of the system. But if Mannerheim started offering to acquire the colonization rights, that was almost inevitably going to change, since the contending "owners" would certainly suspect (correctly) that Mannerheim knew something about it that they didn't. So they'd go and take a look for themselves, in the course of which they would discover the junction for themselves. At which point all manner of litigation, claims, counterclaims, and demands for immense compensation would come frothing to the surface. So Mannerheim had the perfect cover for keeping the junction's existence under wraps while it very carefully and quietly, through a web of agents and arm's-length associations, sought to acquire ownership of Felix for itself without anyone's noticing. Those members of the MSDF who were not themselves Mesans but who were aware of the Felix Junction's existence knew exactly why they were supposed to keep their mouths shut about it. And they didn't know that the "official" survey information which had been shared with them didn't include the Darius Terminus . . . or the SGC-902-36-G Terminus.

Okay, I am a bit lazy to copy all posts relateed to my answer here, please forgive me for that.

First of all, who said that the mission of the Harvest Joy must be announced to let the Alignment move? The lost of Verdant Vista alias Torch should be enough to ring the alarm bells at Mesa/Darius.

And that lead us to point two: why Mannerheim ships and not ships from Darius? The most logic answers is, there are no ships at Darius that could be sent (maybe Sharks but they are not suitible for the task) to watch the whormhole, so they had to ask Mannerheim for a favour to close the whormhole from the twins side.

Maldorian wrote:Okay, I am a bit lazy to copy all posts relateed to my answer here, please forgive me for that.

First of all, who said that the mission of the Harvest Joy must be announced to let the Alignment move? The lost of Verdant Vista alias Torch should be enough to ring the alarm bells at Mesa/Darius.

And that lead us to point two: why Mannerheim ships and not ships from Darius? The most logic answers is, there are no ships at Darius that could be sent (maybe Sharks but they are not suitible for the task) to watch the whormhole, so they had to ask Mannerheim for a favour to close the whormhole from the twins side.

No one is saying it had to be announced, but there was a great chance it would be. Because of the set up of the Torch government, with Manticore, Haven, Erewhon and Maya in the loop of big decisions (and later Beowulf, though that was covert), the MAlign probably felt confident it would know when a research of the wormhole was established.

But that wasn't necessary. The point wasn't that the research could've been done in secret, it's that it wasn't. The picket may have been in the works the moment that Congo fell, with the shuffling of the star lines to the necessary ships and drawing the necessary cover plans to hide the deployment. But as soon as Harvest Joy's assignment was publicised, the Mannerheim Navy probably said, "thanks Manticore for the timetable!"

That also probably means it had to be the same crews who drew the assignment. Having two such forces with Mesan genetic lines would be difficult, three nearly impossible. We don't know what their contingency was if Harvest Joy hadn't been announced. Maybe they'd have deployed only half a squadron at a time and rotated the halves through. But it doesn't matter because it wasn't necessary: Harvest Joy was announced. That also applies to the ships themselves: if at any point in time half your fleet is away from your home system in commerce protection, showing the flag, etc., you can easily "lose" the location of a BC squadron for a time. And as the narrative that tlb pasted shows, most of the MSDF knew about Felix, so having ships deployed there would be no big deal and having some deployed forward to the two "known" termini wouldn't either.

As for whether they made wrong decisions in 1919-1922, I maintain that they were correct based on the information they had at the time. Prior to Oyster Bay and Cachat & Zilwicki returning from Mesa, all the information they had pointed to Manpower being the driving force, for profit motive. Without information they did not have yet, they could not draw any different conclusions. You argument was that they didn't know "why": my point is that they thought they did know. Yes, it was flawed and in the end it may not have mattered, but you can't fault them for drawing conclusions based on what they did know and making plans based on that.

kzt wrote:Well, the plot for the last 10-15 years is full of this stuff. Take Maya. So in a fight with a Mesa fleet the SLN lost multiple vessels. No big deal.

Uh, really?

When was the last time the SLN fought a fleet action? This was from Mesa? When was the last time the SLN lost multiple ships in the same action? Remember that bit about how the officer class of the SLN is largely a multi-generational family thing? How many SLN flag officers just had a grand-kid get killed or maimed?

This was Adm. Rozak and he did not accurately report back to FF HQ either his forces coming into the conflict nor the forces that did attack Torch. So the SLN did not know it had a multi-ship loss against an enemy of near parity strength. I don't remember if he even reported any losses at all! He certainly did not report the captures, those were quietly given to the Royal Torch Navy.

Remember that his cover was that he was helping Erewhon: he was buying a few ships, but the majority were for Erewhon. So they were crewed mostly by Erewhonese spacers. Any losses would be explained away by an inexperienced neobarb crew and shoddy neobarb construction. In fact, he'd have worded his report carefully such that the latter aspect was the conclusion HQ would draw.

tlb wrote:I very much doubt that Darius is supplying Mannerheim with any ships; that would be too hard to keep secret. Also the force picketing the wormhole end that destroyed Harvest Joy is not "off the books"; the Mannerheim officer corps knows a reason for the top secret picketing (but only the star line officers know the true reason. From Torch of Freedom, chapter 50:

The people who are fully briefed on the reason for the deployment aren’t really the once I would be worried about, it’s the people not briefed on the mission who don’t know the real reason who might talk and leave the breadcrumbs. Even if that one squadron of BC’s was fully manned by reliable crews the rest of the BC force probably wont be fully reliable. When we are talking about 3-4 years of deployment you wont be able to always stack the picket force with reliable crews unless the MA has a hell of a lot more people in the MSDF than we are led to believe, or they are predominantly concentrated in one or two classes of ships.

Maldorian wrote:Okay, I am a bit lazy to copy all posts relateed to my answer here, please forgive me for that.

First of all, who said that the mission of the Harvest Joy must be announced to let the Alignment move? The lost of Verdant Vista alias Torch should be enough to ring the alarm bells at Mesa/Darius.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Sorry, there are two problems with that argument: "consistently" and "good chunk". The Mannerheim picket of The Twins was neither consistent nor a good chunk of the fleet. It was a squadron of BCs and we know Mannerheim had an outsized Navy, so I expect this means a dozen or two SDs. And it was deployed only around the time the Harvest Joy was expected to transit. The transit was well-publicised, so the MAlign and Mannerheim had enough notice to know to deploy the special squadron, with trustworthy crews. No one is going to transit a wormhole they don't have navigational data for, so there was no danger before the Harvest Joy.

Having 8 BCs disappear for a bit of time is no big deal. You tell the galaxy that it's exercise manoeuvres and you hide the squadron's deployment in an actual, larger exercise of your fleet. Benjamin got away with it twice with the Protector's Own. The crews themselves have to be somewhat trustworthy: as I said, they know about the wormhole and that it is a secret, but they just don't know the real reason why.

But you're right that that third shift impeller tech may brag at a bar and cause the intelligence services to find out what really happened to the Harvest Joy. The problem is only that right now the GA and the SL have no reason to suspect Mannerheim and the RF are connected to the MAlign.

And that lead us to point two: why Mannerheim ships and not ships from Darius? The most logic answers is, there are no ships at Darius that could be sent (maybe Sharks but they are not suitible for the task) to watch the whormhole, so they had to ask Mannerheim for a favour to close the whormhole from the twins side.

If someone actually stumbles into a system defended by MSDF ships near their HS it might be significantly less suspicious than if that someone stumbled onto ships that don't belong to a navy. They were on an exercise vs ships that are not members of a known navy, they can claim to be another navy but that might get back to the navy in question that their ships are picketing a system they don't know exists with ships they don't have in a system they have never visited.

Sigs wrote:The people who are fully briefed on the reason for the deployment aren’t really the once I would be worried about, it’s the people not briefed on the mission who don’t know the real reason who might talk and leave the breadcrumbs. Even if that one squadron of BC’s was fully manned by reliable crews the rest of the BC force probably wont be fully reliable. When we are talking about 3-4 years of deployment you wont be able to always stack the picket force with reliable crews unless the MA has a hell of a lot more people in the MSDF than we are led to believe, or they are predominantly concentrated in one or two classes of ships.

That's not a 4-year deployment. Congo fell in 1919, so that's when then started putting together the task force. They were probably hurrying, but then Manticore announced Harvest Joy was going. At that point, with the research in the open, they had the time to do it right.

So let's say the task force got to The Twins in mid-1920. They were there until the Harvest Joy transited, that was in 1921. After that no-return transit, the danger lessened. It might be acceptable to send someone from Felix to The Twins every couple of weeks to see if another survey ship is there trying to figure out how to go through. That would mean the location of The Twins has been compromised, but not yet of Felix.

That may not be a wise policy, but it may be the lesser risk of the options. As you've argued, keeping secret squadrons a secret from everyone in the navy is a difficult proposition long-term. Better to lose The Twins than to have the GA poking around the RF Navy trying to figure out why it has squadrons disappearing for extended periods and a third shift impeller tech was bragging about bagging a pirate at the time Harvest Joy transited.

Sigs wrote:The people who are fully briefed on the reason for the deployment aren’t really the once I would be worried about, it’s the people not briefed on the mission who don’t know the real reason who might talk and leave the breadcrumbs. Even if that one squadron of BC’s was fully manned by reliable crews the rest of the BC force probably wont be fully reliable. When we are talking about 3-4 years of deployment you wont be able to always stack the picket force with reliable crews unless the MA has a hell of a lot more people in the MSDF than we are led to believe, or they are predominantly concentrated in one or two classes of ships.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:That's not a 4-year deployment. Congo fell in 1919, so that's when then started putting together the task force. They were probably hurrying, but then Manticore announced Harvest Joy was going. At that point, with the research in the open, they had the time to do it right.

The textev suggests that it is closer to an eight year deployment; the Mannerheim Navy is "officially" there to protect Mannerheim's claim once the ownership difficulties are straightened out. It may be that the special composition of the picket forces only began after Torch was created. It could also be that this only happened after the planned transit was announced, it really does not matter. The officer corps knows that the ships are deployed there and that there is a very good reason to keep the interest in the star system with the "two" termini secret. We only know that star-lines are a minority in the Navy as a whole, but that does not say how many there are. I expect that there are quite a few star-lines members on the RF planets.