Where's Haven?

Just got done reading UH and have one question. Well, it actually applies to the last few books since the inception of the alliance with Haven. What exactly are they doing? Because with the exception of 10th fleet it appears the Elios Pritchard has taken her ball and gone home.

There has been, as far as I can tell, exactly 0 mention of any Havenite ships involved in any operation that the Alliance has taken part of. Not in Laccoon I or II, not in helping to defend Beowulf, not even deployed to Silesia to free up, or reinforce Manticoran ships there. With the one exception of Mike's taking of Mesa which, as I recall, had 10th fleet in attendance, they have done what exactly?

Haven is in a far better position to become the backbone, or at the very least, the main op-force against the Solarion League. Their tech base, unlike Manticore, has not been touched and is entirely intact. Their technology, while not as advanced as Manticore's is still much better than the Solarion League's. Their shipyards are all intact and are more numerous than what Manticore had available even during the war. Bolt Hole, I understand, is in the process of re-tooling to produce Manticoran equivalent weapons/systems, but I have read nothing about what all of Haven's other shipyards are doing. Apparently they are all laying fallow, waiting for... something.

Haven has the capacity to start churning out BC's using current Havenite technology that is still better than the current Solarion League ships, or at the very least current Warrior (?) class BC's and below should have been integrated into Laccoon II giving the Alliance a much needed boost in ship hulls. Yes I did read UH where the Solarion League dispatched it's ships for Buccaneer before it even knew that Laccoon II was in affect, but a squadron or two of Warrior class BC's or Mars class heavy cruisers should have been a welcome addition to any of those blocking forces carrying out the operation.

This is not meant as a criticism, I am honestly curious as to what exactly the Havenite Navy is doing with itself these days. Because apparently they all went home.

Planning and rehearsing Beatrice 2. Gonna take a lot of firepower...

kzt wrote:Planning and rehearsing Beatrice 2. Gonna take a lot of firepower...

Here is my question to RFC and his reply

runsforcelery
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richardinor wrote:
All the battles were RMN vs. SLN. I would have liked to see a RHN vs. SLN battle.


Ah, Operation Nemesis was carried out by Grand Fleet. You know, the one with that honking big task force of RHN SD(P)s?

Sorry. I wanted the reader focused on what was going on aboard Honor's flagship (and inside Honor) so I didn't give you an RHN perspective. Perhaps I should have, but . . . .


"Oh, bother!" said Pooh, as Piglet came back from the dead.

gmg2dave wrote:Haven has the capacity to start churning out BC's using current Havenite technology that is still better than the current Solarion League ships, or at the very least current Warrior (?) class BC's and below should have been integrated into Laccoon II giving the Alliance a much needed boost in ship hulls. Yes I did read UH where the Solarion League dispatched it's ships for Buccaneer before it even knew that Laccoon II was in affect, but a squadron or two of Warrior class BC's or Mars class heavy cruisers should have been a welcome addition to any of those blocking forces carrying out the operation.

This is not meant as a criticism, I am honestly curious as to what exactly the Havenite Navy is doing with itself these days. Because apparently they all went home.

I think you may overestimate the capabilities of Havenite ships below the wall. They haven't seen the same kind of qualitative improvements that Manticoran equivalents have.

Textev in AAC tells us that they refitted their BCs heavily by replacing offensive weapons with more anti-missile equipment - essentially relegating them to being large escorts.

That does mean the Nevada would struggle to land many hits on a Warlord at long range. But I don't remember seeing the Havenites use a cruiser-weight DDM or ERM, so they would be unable to respond to Cataphracts until the range had closed - at which point the Nevada is able to switch to its BC-weight SDMs.

Convert-class battlecruiser(ex-Warlord, Flight I)
Mass: 918,750 tons
Broadside: 26M, 6L, 6G, 16CM, 12PD

Nevada-class battlecruiser
Mass: 911,250
Broadside: 28M, 12G, 12CM, 16PD

Based on known stats and even allowing for successive flights of the Warlord design to grow, it's still not a fight the RHN/GA should want to force.

munroburton wrote:

gmg2dave wrote:Haven has the capacity to start churning out BC's using current Havenite technology that is still better than the current Solarion League ships, or at the very least current Warrior (?) class BC's and below should have been integrated into Laccoon II giving the Alliance a much needed boost in ship hulls. Yes I did read UH where the Solarion League dispatched it's ships for Buccaneer before it even knew that Laccoon II was in affect, but a squadron or two of Warrior class BC's or Mars class heavy cruisers should have been a welcome addition to any of those blocking forces carrying out the operation.

This is not meant as a criticism, I am honestly curious as to what exactly the Havenite Navy is doing with itself these days. Because apparently they all went home.

I think you may overestimate the capabilities of Havenite ships below the wall. They haven't seen the same kind of qualitative improvements that Manticoran equivalents have.

Textev in AAC tells us that they refitted their BCs heavily by replacing offensive weapons with more anti-missile equipment - essentially relegating them to being large escorts.

That does mean the Nevada would struggle to land many hits on a Warlord at long range. But I don't remember seeing the Havenites use a cruiser-weight DDM or ERM, so they would be unable to respond to Cataphracts until the range had closed - at which point the Nevada is able to switch to its BC-weight SDMs.

Convert-class battlecruiser(ex-Warlord, Flight I)
Mass: 918,750 tons
Broadside: 26M, 6L, 6G, 16CM, 12PD

Nevada-class battlecruiser
Mass: 911,250
Broadside: 28M, 12G, 12CM, 16PD

Based on known stats and even allowing for successive flights of the Warlord design to grow, it's still not a fight the RHN/GA should want to force.

Supposedly later flights (and refits of existing) Warlords and Mars lost some offensive firepower for more defenses (both CMs and PDLCs. Haven never developed EDMs or Cruiser weight MDMs or DDMs that we were told of, no offbore launchers, and the SD MDMs were huge beasts. Any Warlord or Mars would have no problem fending off a SLN analogue's firepower, but their missile's would be lower ranged, and slower, with better penaids and more hitting power.

I wouldn't be overly afraid of an SLN ship in a Havenite ship, but I wouldn't want to take them on at more than a 1:1 ratio.

There's also the fact that the Havenites learned most of their tricks from the SLN, or at least Technodyne. Now, they've taken what they learned places the SLN hasn't yet imagined, but they're still not going to come completely out of the blue the way some of what the Manties do has. That will make a noticeable difference in both offensive and defensive capability.

The big advantage the RHN ought to have in a stand-up fight with the SLN is that equipping them with RMN RDs should just be a matter of loading them into stores and installing software to read the signals, since they already have a lower-grade FTL system deployed [the big challenge would be generating high data-rate signals, not reading them with shipboard sensors]. If that was done, the Havenites are quite capable of coming up with Apollo Lite on their own even if nobody thinks to mention the idea to them.

Since I doubt that anybody has downgraded the Mars engineering suite in the process of fixing the power plants, they should still have that massive pod capacity, and Apollo Lite would give them the ability to ream an SLN formation from just outside Cataphract range even using their own MDMs. I'd say they can safely go up against 2 or 3:1 odds even in BCs, provided they have the logistics support to make those pods available when needed.

gmg2dave wrote:Haven has the capacity to start churning out BC's using current Havenite technology that is still better than the current Solarion League ships, or at the very least current Warrior (?) class BC's and below should have been integrated into Laccoon II giving the Alliance a much needed boost in ship hulls. Yes I did read UH where the Solarion League dispatched it's ships for Buccaneer before it even knew that Laccoon II was in affect, but a squadron or two of Warrior class BC's or Mars class heavy cruisers should have been a welcome addition to any of those blocking forces carrying out the operation.

This is not meant as a criticism, I am honestly curious as to what exactly the Havenite Navy is doing with itself these days. Because apparently they all went home.

Theemile wrote:

munroburton wrote:I think you may overestimate the capabilities of Havenite ships below the wall. They haven't seen the same kind of qualitative improvements that Manticoran equivalents have.

Textev in AAC tells us that they refitted their BCs heavily by replacing offensive weapons with more anti-missile equipment - essentially relegating them to being large escorts.

That does mean the Nevada would struggle to land many hits on a Warlord at long range. But I don't remember seeing the Havenites use a cruiser-weight DDM or ERM, so they would be unable to respond to Cataphracts until the range had closed - at which point the Nevada is able to switch to its BC-weight SDMs.

Convert-class battlecruiser(ex-Warlord, Flight I)
Mass: 918,750 tons
Broadside: 26M, 6L, 6G, 16CM, 12PD

Nevada-class battlecruiser
Mass: 911,250
Broadside: 28M, 12G, 12CM, 16PD

Based on known stats and even allowing for successive flights of the Warlord design to grow, it's still not a fight the RHN/GA should want to force.

Supposedly later flights (and refits of existing) Warlords and Mars lost some offensive firepower for more defenses (both CMs and PDLCs. Haven never developed EDMs or Cruiser weight MDMs or DDMs that we were told of, no offbore launchers, and the SD MDMs were huge beasts. Any Warlord or Mars would have no problem fending off a SLN analogue's firepower, but their missile's would be lower ranged, and slower, with better penaids and more hitting power.

I wouldn't be overly afraid of an SLN ship in a Havenite ship, but I wouldn't want to take them on at more than a 1:1 ratio.

Louis R wrote:There's also the fact that the Havenites learned most of their tricks from the SLN, or at least Technodyne. Now, they've taken what they learned places the SLN hasn't yet imagined, but they're still not going to come completely out of the blue the way some of what the Manties do has. That will make a noticeable difference in both offensive and defensive capability.

The big advantage the RHN ought to have in a stand-up fight with the SLN is that equipping them with RMN RDs should just be a matter of loading them into stores and installing software to read the signals, since they already have a lower-grade FTL system deployed [the big challenge would be generating high data-rate signals, not reading them with shipboard sensors]. If that was done, the Havenites are quite capable of coming up with Apollo Lite on their own even if nobody thinks to mention the idea to them.

Since I doubt that anybody has downgraded the Mars engineering suite in the process of fixing the power plants, they should still have that massive pod capacity, and Apollo Lite would give them the ability to ream an SLN formation from just outside Cataphract range even using their own MDMs. I'd say they can safely go up against 2 or 3:1 odds even in BCs, provided they have the logistics support to make those pods available when needed.

Haven has the capacity to start churning out BC's using current Havenite technology that is still better than the current Solarion League ships, or at the very least current Warrior (?) class BC's and below should have been integrated into Laccoon II giving the Alliance a much needed boost in ship hulls. Yes I did read UH where the Solarion League dispatched it's ships for Buccaneer before it even knew that Laccoon II was in affect, but a squadron or two of Warrior class BC's or Mars class heavy cruisers should have been a welcome addition to any of those blocking forces carrying out the operation.

This is not meant as a criticism, I am honestly curious as to what exactly the Havenite Navy is doing with itself these days. Because apparently they all went home.

I think you may overestimate the capabilities of Havenite ships below the wall. They haven't seen the same kind of qualitative improvements that Manticoran equivalents have.

Textev in AAC tells us that they refitted their BCs heavily by replacing offensive weapons with more anti-missile equipment - essentially relegating them to being large escorts.

That does mean the Nevada would struggle to land many hits on a Warlord at long range. But I don't remember seeing the Havenites use a cruiser-weight DDM or ERM, so they would be unable to respond to Cataphracts until the range had closed - at which point the Nevada is able to switch to its BC-weight SDMs.

Convert-class battlecruiser(ex-Warlord, Flight I)
Mass: 918,750 tons
Broadside: 26M, 6L, 6G, 16CM, 12PD

Nevada-class battlecruiser
Mass: 911,250
Broadside: 28M, 12G, 12CM, 16PD

Based on known stats and even allowing for successive flights of the Warlord design to grow, it's still not a fight the RHN/GA should want to force.

Supposedly later flights (and refits of existing) Warlords and Mars lost some offensive firepower for more defenses (both CMs and PDLCs. Haven never developed EDMs or Cruiser weight MDMs or DDMs that we were told of, no offbore launchers, and the SD MDMs were huge beasts. Any Warlord or Mars would have no problem fending off a SLN analogue's firepower, but their missile's would be lower ranged, and slower, with better penaids and more hitting power.

I wouldn't be overly afraid of an SLN ship in a Havenite ship, but I wouldn't want to take them on at more than a 1:1 ratio.[/quote][/quote]

A very strange argument. First off, we don't KNOW that there has not been an upgrade for the below the line ships. For the last few books there has not been all that much directly about the Haven navy.

There is no reason there should not have been an upgrade. Nowhere have we seen anything about that or even a lot about any tech upgrades.

Second, we have only been looking at some very specialized areas. Haven might well have been doing a lot of things in other places. We already have three separate threads: mainline, Talbott and Zilwicki-Cachat. We could have another half dozen or so if RFC were willing to hold up the plot from going anywhere.

Third, by this time, the Haven navy will not "have learned from the SLN." They've been fighting the Manties for more than twenty years. They'e learned from them.

Remember that we focus heavily on Honor, Z and C, and Talbott. That pushes Prichard, etc., a bit to the side.

I suspect that most of the Haven ships, below the Wall, produced in the last 5 years are more than capable of sucessfully engaging SLN of the same nominal class. What they don't have the apparent (from a Solly perspective) the almost magical ability of the RMN ships.

Haven had been evolving both it's ships and tech so they do have a signifcant advantage over SLN, just not the distance the RNM has. You do have to add to that mix, however, that the Haven naval experience in actual combat against RMN so their tactics have evolved far beyond the SLN and the Haven captains and crews have the experience of applying their own systems & weapons against RMN (dispite their own tec disadvantage) so they will get a substantial performance boost in the application of their own hardward and tactics when engaging SLN.

I can think to a couple of reasons why we are not seing RHN ships mentioned in either Silesia or in the Lacoon II operations.
First, Silesia. Manticore does't need anybody else mucking about in Silesia while they are in the long term process of solidifying their hold and control there. It's Manticore INTERNAL POLICY to make the systems and populations in their portion of it part of the SEM. There is going to be enough challanges with the IAE as a partner there even if the Andies don't start looking to quietly play games in the SEM systems. Manticore has a bunch of relativly less capable ships below the wall that are serving in Silesia and they are quite capable of dealing with almost anything (other than IAE wallers or new 1st line smaller ships if things get iffy) unless some other party shows up. Not beyond possibility that the Alignment could send a Spider Drive warship or two or even so purloined former (or clandestinely built modern SLN designes) there as pirates to destablize the area. The idea of inviting in Haven to stiffen the RMN in Silesia would send exactly the wrong message to those new member systems that are going to have to learn to Manticoran citizens. Might give the impression that Manticore isn't up to the job.

Lacoon: The Lacoon interdiction and seizure of wormholes has enough problems with differntials of weapons and capabilities between ships assigned (think Hexapuma at Monica) of older and leading edge ships. The Haven ships would compilate that further. It's not so much pushing any SLN force off a terminus, it's deploying to hold the terminus against the SLN comming to take it back. Not that several more BCs, CA, and DDs wouldn't help, it's just that the RHN ships would mostly have the lower missile engagement range. Just having them there with even the Haven counter missile capabilities would help thicken the defense (and -unless the SLN people have learned a few things and go for RMN ships 1st- force the SLN to engage against a larger number of platforms).

We also know that Haven is in the process of sheding systems that were captured over the last 50+ years and they still have a lot of obligations to secure those systems.
What is off with 10th Fleet around Mesa is important if for only making this a "joint" operation, not just Manticore. While the new RMN systems in Talbot arn't so much at risk of Haven playing political games, it is still vulnerable to incursions from the SL area with pirates and people looking to make trouble or taking advantage of the turmoil there to aquire ownership of non Manticorian systems. Yes, Manticore isn't going to take over formal protection of the non-Empire systems, but it sure as hell isn't going to not maintain a presence to provide some level of "commerce protection" and, given the GA presence in the Talbot area, using RHN ships to do that is practical and shows a level of actual cooperation to anybody paying attention. Don't mess with the GA, you will piss off a lot of Star Nations, all of which have larger navies than 90% of the rest of the known Start Nations. Besides, it really doesn't make a lot of difference who kills pirates as long as they are killed. A rouge SLN BC running into a RMN and a RHN DD doing a commerce protection sweep is in for a very bad day.

The SLN has deployed huge numbers of DDMs. What percentage of a have force will survive to reach SDM range?

The earlier books portray the RMN as having a technology advantage over the PRN that only partially offsets numerical advantage. War of Honor and Ashes of Victory portray major battles in which SD(P)s and LACs are so decisive that BCs, CAs and DDs are almost irrelevant. At All Costs portrays continued strategic level warfare with BC, CA and DD combat not even being a side show. The PRN had obviously been fixated on developing MDMs, SD(P)s, LACs and CLACs. Probable that not much improvement on PRH below the wall ships could be made with the PRB technology.

This being said, RoHN BCs, CAs and DDs can probably kick SLN ships within their own weight class. However; PRH DDs will not be reaming SLN BCs. The PRH probably doesn't have nearly the number of smaller ships as the SLN to be much help.