roseandheather wrote:Jeroswen wrote:What I would really like to see is the Solarian Raiders running into a Grayson force, yes I miss those guys, of older ships with similar ranges to the Solarian Navy. The tech advantage would still swing to the Graysons but they would have to work for it. Also, I miss watching a professional force facing a larger enemy and winning through guile and cunning. Plus it would illustrate for the reader in plain terms, that even if the tech was closely matched, decades of battlefield experience trump officers appointed because of political connections. Icing on the cake would be if Caslet was commanding the Grayson force. I know it can't happen. He is probably way to senior for that. I'll just have to hope to see Yu and Caslet in future books tearing it up with the Graysons.
I totally get where you're coming from - I miss my Graysons, too!! - but the one thing that you're missing is that Grayson is less likely to have older, technologically inferior ships than Manticore is. Pretty much all throughout the series, the Graysons have been the first to put bleeding-edge ships into space, because they have such an explosively expanding Navy and no backlog of older, outdated ships to weigh them down. I'd say chances are that, all told, Grayson's navy is even more technologically superior, on average, than Manticore's is, because they started with a totally blank slate.
Once the newest ships start rolling off the assembly lines at Bolthole, obviously, the Grand Alliance is going to have quite a bit more in the way of technological parity among its three star nations, since Blackbird, Hephaestus, Vulcan, and Weyland were all taken out in Oyster Bay and so Manticore and Grayson won't be building much of anything on their own, but Grayson still has plenty of tonnage in space - and the will to use it.
All that said, I would be ecstatic to see Caslet, Yu, Yanakov, and Brentworth back in the action in future books. Not to mention Miss Owens, who is probably going to wind up with a command of her own in the GSN sooner rather than later.
Oh, Alignment. I almost feel sorry for you.
Oh I hadn't forgotten that Grayson is always pushing the boundaries on ship design. The desire for the ships to be Grayson is mainly because I miss those guys a lot. However lets put on the cap of Grayson Navy for a second.
1. Your main construction yard has been blown away along with all your new construction.
2. You have also lost all your apollo construction from the same raid.
3. You are now facing off against 2 enemies. One is the SLN which has the largest fleet in the known universe. Two is an unknown with tech better than yours.
If 'I' was in charge I would plan on reactivating every ship I had in mothballs that I still had a stockpile of weapons for. Well every ship that I could man with trained personnel. Getting yards up and running has the priority but you can do more than one thing at a time.
The reasons:
1. Even the old ships (pre-Buttercup) have a big tech advantage over SLN ships.
2. I won't be getting any new ships until about 1.5 years after construction starts again.
3. Lets say I have quite a stock pile of old single stage missiles, let alone older MDM's. Every one of those I use saves me one more Apollo.
4. I could put any ships using single stage missiles in less critical areas freeing up more modern ships for use in the fight.
Now, if all the old single stage ships have been sent to the breakers, then so be it. But we were going for the "gotcha" factor and a small squadron of old Grayson ships (cruisers and destroyers) getting jumped by a larger force of SLN ships with cataphract missiles would be really cool to read.
It would be cool to have Honor pass off the death ride hat to the next generation. She can't go on any more death rides but those she has trained certainly can. Plus if Honor was present for the debrief it would be very cool to see her thoughts witnessing such an event from the outside instead of living it.
Anyway, I realize I may be stretching things a bit but I figured since Manticore still has single stage missile ships in inventory then Grayson might as well.
