Speculating on the GA-MAlign Conflict

SWM wrote:

Zakharra wrote: Huh. I got the impression that Moriarty was being placed in the Beowulf system specifically because it was likely to be attacked by the SLN and that it would take about 2 months to get all of the installations in place and up and running. Which would place it in time for a live fire test on the SLN invasion fleet. It's going to take 2-3 months to get enough SLN SDs, DDs, CAs and other ships to have a chance at punching out the Beowulf SDF.

Yes, people have guessed that it would take only a couple months to install Moriarty. But some have suggested that the League could have a fleet at Beowulf sooner than that. After all, they had a fleet ready to go after Manticore, and we don't know what was done with it. So the question is how soon can the League attack?

That's something I've written about myself on the boards, SWM. Because it was enough of a threat that even Honor worried about it during Roger's and Rivka's wedding.

As for the "follow-on fleet' of approximatley 600 SD's, we really don't know where Tasmania is in relation to Beowulf, except that it takes several weeks, IIRC, to get a dispatch boat from Earth to Tasmaina.

So it would take several weeks to get the word to them, give it several days to prep, and whatever cruising time it is from Tasmania to Beowulf.

The other option is that Admiral Tsang (and presumably her 100 or so SD's) are in the Sol System. Add 40-50 SD's from "Home Fleet" (I am making a presumption that Earth, as the political center of the SL, along with numerous military HQ's, will have a substantial fleet presence...but I may be wrong on that) and you have a fairly hefty force.

Send out couriers to every system within 5 T-days travel that has a SD force. At an average of 7 LY/day (allowing acceleration and decel time), that covers everything within a 70 LY sphere from Sol, which should include a good chunk of the Core...and most BF units. Call it 200-250 SD's in reach.

Give them 48 hrs turn-around and 7 days travel to Sol, one week to integrate and plan, and one week to travel to Beowulf, and you could (if things went to schedule, which they probably won't) put 300-400 SD's in Beowulf in about a month.

So I really don't know which will be faster. The fastest is to take Tsang's force with any reinforcement in the Sol system and send them immediately out to Beowulf--that will undoubtedly beat the deployment of Mycroft, but would it be enough in the eyes of the SLN to risk it?

I guess we'll see come the next book...whenever that will be (yeah, I'm looking at you, RFC... )

Hutch wrote:
That's something I've written about myself on the boards, SWM. Because it was enough of a threat that even Honor worried about it during Roger's and Rivka's wedding.

As for the "follow-on fleet' of approximatley 600 SD's, we really don't know where Tasmania is in relation to Beowulf, except that it takes several weeks, IIRC, to get a dispatch boat from Earth to Tasmaina.

So it would take several weeks to get the word to them, give it several days to prep, and whatever cruising time it is from Tasmania to Beowulf.

The other option is that Admiral Tsang (and presumably her 100 or so SD's) are in the Sol System. Add 40-50 SD's from "Home Fleet" (I am making a presumption that Earth, as the political center of the SL, along with numerous military HQ's, will have a substantial fleet presence...but I may be wrong on that) and you have a fairly hefty force.

Send out couriers to every system within 5 T-days travel that has a SD force. At an average of 7 LY/day (allowing acceleration and decel time), that covers everything within a 70 LY sphere from Sol, which should include a good chunk of the Core...and most BF units. Call it 200-250 SD's in reach.

Give them 48 hrs turn-around and 7 days travel to Sol, one week to integrate and plan, and one week to travel to Beowulf, and you could (if things went to schedule, which they probably won't) put 300-400 SD's in Beowulf in about a month.

So I really don't know which will be faster. The fastest is to take Tsang's force with any reinforcement in the Sol system and send them immediately out to Beowulf--that will undoubtedly beat the deployment of Mycroft, but would it be enough in the eyes of the SLN to risk it?

I guess we'll see come the next book...whenever that will be (yeah, I'm looking at you, RFC... )

[Edited to add third option]

I've been having a think about where Tasmania could be located. I had assumed that it was more or less on a direct line between Sol and Manticore, as that would be the logical place to stage a force intended to attack Manticore, but that doesn't work.

We know that Tasmania is slightly over 400 light years from Manticore. The Manticore-Sigma Draconis wormhole covers 475 light years and according to every Honorverse map I've seen Sigma Draconis isn't far off the straight line from Sol to Manticore itself. Tasmania were on or near that same straight line, then it wouldn't be much more than 75 light years past Sigma Draconis, and according to Wikipedia Sigma Draconis (which is a real star, for anyone who doesn't already know) is only 18.8 light years from Sol, so Tasmania would only be 95-100 or so light years from Sol.

Obviously, this is impossible; there's no way it takes a Solarian dispatch boat 'several weeks' to cover 100 light years. All of which says to me that Tasmania must be somewhere way the hell out in the Verge, somewhere on a circle with a 400 light year radius centred on Manticore. By my reckoning, that puts it in one of four regions:

1) Somewhere out toward the space between the Talbott Quadrant and the Asgard Cluster. Dangerously close to Talbott, in fact.

2) Out in the Verge systems on the way toward Erewhon.

3) Somewhere on the Manticore side of Sol, but far enough above or below the plane of the galactic disk (is it called the ecliptic when dealing with galaxies rather than star systems?) to still be 400 light years from Manticore but weeks away from Sol as well.

Thoughts? Comments? Faults in my reasoning?

Dafmeister wrote:I've been having a think about where Tasmania could be located. I had assumed that it was more or less on a direct line between Sol and Manticore, as that would be the logical place to stage a force intended to attack Manticore, but that doesn't work.

We know that Tasmania is slightly over 400 light years from Manticore. The Manticore-Sigma Draconis wormhole covers 475 light years and according to every Honorverse map I've seen Sigma Draconis isn't far off the straight line from Sol to Manticore itself. Tasmania were on or near that same straight line, then it wouldn't be much more than 75 light years past Sigma Draconis, and according to Wikipedia Sigma Draconis (which is a real star, for anyone who doesn't already know) is only 18.8 light years from Sol, so Tasmania would only be 95-100 or so light years from Sol.

Obviously, this is impossible; there's no way it takes a Solarian dispatch boat 'several weeks' to cover 100 light years. All of which says to me that Tasmania must be somewhere way the hell out in the Verge, somewhere on a circle with a 400 light year radius centred on Manticore. By my reckoning, that puts it in one of four regions:

1) Somewhere out toward the space between the Talbott Quadrant and the Asgard Cluster. Dangerously close to Talbott, in fact.

2) Out in the Verge systems on the way toward Erewhon.

3) Somewhere on the Manticore side of Sol, but far enough above or below the plane of the galactic disk (is it called the ecliptic when dealing with galaxies rather than star systems?) to still be 400 light years from Manticore but weeks away from Sol as well.

Thoughts? Comments? Faults in my reasoning?

You are correct that the real distance to the real system Sigma Draconis is around 20 light-years from Earth. But the text specifically states that Beowulf is 40 light-years from Old Earth. RFC made a mistake and accidentally doubled the distance. And unfortunately, enough had been published which depended on Beowulf being 40 light-years from Old Earth that he did not feel that he could change it. Therefore, Beowulf is 40 light-years from Old Earth, and RFC stopped mentioning that its star was Sigma Draconis.

But you are wrong that Tasmania is in the Verge. Mission of Honor specifically states that Tasmania is in the Shell, not the Protectorates or the Verge.

Manticore is 512 light-years from Sol and a bit over 400 light-years from Tasmania. If Tasmania is approximately along the (near-)line formed by Sol-Beowulf-Manticore, Tasmania would be approximately 112 light-years from Sol and about 72 light-years from Beowulf. 112 light-years from Sol is 13.6 days travel by a courier, and is also in the Shell. That's two weeks. Thus, all evidence is that Tasmania is not that far off the line between Beowulf and Manticore. That would put Tasmania only about [edit]10.5[/edit] days from Beowulf by warship.

So, two weeks for a message from Sol to Tasmania, some delay to get the fleet moving, and [edit]one and a half weeks to get to Beowulf. A fleet from Tasmania can reach Beowulf before Mycroft comes online, if the message went out at the same time that construction began.[/edit]

By the way, I have not been able to find any text evidence that it takes several weeks for a dispatch boat to travel from Sol to Tasmania. I've done a fairly thorough search of the books to compile all references to distances and travel times in the text, and I could not find anything on the travel time to Tasmania from Sol. Does anyone have a reference? If there is any, I need to update my distance spreadsheet.

Clearly, I've seriously overestimated the speed of dispatch boats. Should have looked at the speeds by hyper band and done some actual maths

I think the evidence for how long it takes to get to Tasmania comes from Filaretta and his staff grumbling about delays in getting intel updates from whatever the SLN calls its version of the Admiralty.

Dafmeister wrote:I think the evidence for how long it takes to get to Tasmania comes from Filaretta and his staff grumbling about delays in getting intel updates from whatever the SLN calls its version of the Admiralty.

Yeah, but I don't recall any statements about how long it took. I'll check again, though. It wouldn't surprise me if I missed a reference if it was indirect.

SWM wrote:

Dafmeister wrote:I think the evidence for how long it takes to get to Tasmania comes from Filaretta and his staff grumbling about delays in getting intel updates from whatever the SLN calls its version of the Admiralty.

Yeah, but I don't recall any statements about how long it took. I'll check again, though. It wouldn't surprise me if I missed a reference if it was indirect.

The only reference I could find (off the top of my head) was this quote from Rampajet's briefing in Mission of Honor:

"What most of you are not aware of, however," Rajampet continued, "is that we have heavy forces considerably closer to Manticore than you may have believed. And far closer than the Manties could ever have anticipated. In fact, Admiral Filareta is currently in the Tasmania System, conducting a major fleet training exercise—Operation East Wind—with just over three hundred of the wall. Which means, of course, that he's only a very little more than four hundred light-years from Manticore and that he could reach that star system within a little over six weeks from receiving his orders . . . or approximately two and a half months from the date we dispatch them. Which means he should be in position, barring unanticpated delays, by May twentieth."

Italics mine.

So...a month to get the orders, receive and integrate his additional ships, and leave Tasmaina for Manticore.

So, two weeks dispatch boat transit and two weeks preparation? (And yes, I know in the 'real world', it took him longer, especially in waiting for the Technodyne missiles). That would put ships in Tasmania a minimum of a week from Beowulf, probaby a little farther than that.

Hmmmmm....very interesting.

Hutch wrote:So, two weeks dispatch boat transit and two weeks preparation? (And yes, I know in the 'real world', it took him longer, especially in waiting for the Technodyne missiles). That would put ships in Tasmania a minimum of a week from Beowulf, probaby a little farther than that.

Hmmmmm....very interesting.

From the examples of Adm Crandall and Adm Filareta, have we seen any BF task force that didn't see some (or a lot of) slippage in movement schedules?

I think I would add at least 20% to any time estimate about Battle Fleet movements.

Hutch wrote:
The only reference I could find (off the top of my head) was this quote from Rampajet's briefing in Mission of Honor:

"What most of you are not aware of, however," Rajampet continued, "is that we have heavy forces considerably closer to Manticore than you may have believed. And far closer than the Manties could ever have anticipated. In fact, Admiral Filareta is currently in the Tasmania System, conducting a major fleet training exercise—Operation East Wind—with just over three hundred of the wall. Which means, of course, that he's only a very little more than four hundred light-years from Manticore and that he could reach that star system within a little over six weeks from receiving his orders . . . or approximately two and a half months from the date we dispatch them. Which means he should be in position, barring unanticpated delays, by May twentieth."

Italics mine.

So...a month to get the orders, receive and integrate his additional ships, and leave Tasmaina for Manticore.

So, two weeks dispatch boat transit and two weeks preparation? (And yes, I know in the 'real world', it took him longer, especially in waiting for the Technodyne missiles). That would put ships in Tasmania a minimum of a week from Beowulf, probaby a little farther than that.

Hmmmmm....very interesting.

I'd interpret that text as saying that it's a 4 week flight time from Sol to Tasmania. Rajampet says that Filaretta could be at Manticore a little over six weeks after receiving his orders, not a little over six weeks from his departure time. To me, that says that any preparation and integration work would be a part of that six weeks, leaving the remainder of the two and half months as being the time taken for the orders to get from Sol to Tasmania.

Dafmeister wrote: I'd interpret that text as saying that it's a 4 week flight time from Sol to Tasmania. Rajampet says that Filaretta could be at Manticore a little over six weeks after receiving his orders, not a little over six weeks from his departure time. To me, that says that any preparation and integration work would be a part of that six weeks, leaving the remainder of the two and half months as being the time taken for the orders to get from Sol to Tasmania.

Indeed. Your reading/interpretation of the quote is better than mine.

Of course, that does leave us with the problem of (if Tasmania is ~225 LY from Sol (28 days x 8LY/day) and then 400 LY from there to Manticore, while Beowulf is about 457 LY (per a couple of the maps that show distances) from Manticore, it does leave a bit of a math problem, doesn't it?

Of course, I stopped taking math after High School, so maybe I'm wrong.

Sure would like to see where Tasmania is on a map--it would answer many questions (and open many more).