A Manticoran Disinformation Gamble

I been having some thoughts on the future story-lines of the series and a slightly crazy idea has come to me. Currently the massive tech advantage Manticore and Haven now share over the SLN is one of the big game pieces in the plot right now. I have been wondering how Manticore might try to use this and a slight crazy intelligence scheme popped into my head (albeit one worthy of the Manpower Incident in its potential to backfire). Its a huge gamble but it would definitely cause some movement on all sides.

At this point any Sollie intelligence officer or techy or transteller will sell significant parts of their anatomy in order to get their hands on anything regarding Manticoran tech be it plans/schematics, samples pieces, or whole functional units.

Now what if some enterprising Manty intelligence agent were to suddenly start to offer all these secrets for sale?! Take a page out of Mesa's handbook and play the chaos game. They would definitely find anyone they approached for a sale as willing and as generous as they could dream.

However, what if said Intel-broker wasn't giving out real Manti hardware (which would be monumentally dangerous in the present circumstances) but instead deliberately modified or known-to-be defective designs or components. The agent issues them out to a handful of peoples around the Solarian League (not the main federal peoples on Old Earth), especially the ones who are openly resentful towards someone else in the League, or a greedy middling transteller whos first thought is profit and not loyalty to the greater good of the SLN. Remember the real power brokers and influence peddlers within the League are pretty cynical and self-centered bastards with their main focus being "numero uno" or their families pockets at least, not loyalty to something bigger than themselves (like the Manticoran crown, or Republican people).

Dangle enough lines and give out enough (defective) toys before anyone knows about the defects, and then let others in on the secret of the transfers. What you then get is a large number of greedy and self entered people suddenly fighting with each other over secrets of immense power and profit, only to suddenly find that they do not really work anyway.

What you get is a massive intelligence powerplay and foulup with a lot of people who should be bonding together in the face of a common enemy all squabbling over scraps and not achieving anything, or building something new only to run into errors and get egg on their faces, or have others on their own side trying to steal it form them for their own gain.

That is my little idea.

Or alternatively, no-one on Manticores side will want to rock the boat any further or risk having the SLN getting any (even potentially) good ideas, and the person who suggests the crazy idea gets fed to Sonja Hemphill as a chewtoy for trying to play dangerous games with her toys.

There are several stories about someone being presented with an impossible device and managing to make it real.
One of the more famous stories is a group of scientists being shown a film of a scientist testing an anti-grav device and being told that the inventor died in an accident soon after. The scientists soon managed to create an anti-grav device of their own, only to be told afterwards that the film that they had been shown had been faked, they hadn't been re-creating existing technology but had actually been creating something new!

Any attempt to pass of faulty technology as working runs the risk of the recipients managing to not only make it work but somehow improve it to make it reach near-Superweapon levels. Look what Grayson did when no-one told them how Inertial Compensators were supposed to work.

All in all, the risk is too great and the payoff too small.

Not a good idea.

SL techs and scientists aren't stupid, so the SEM/GA would have to let pieces of tech that could work fall into SL hands. Even if the pieces are defective (bad manufacturing) it would teach them something valuable and give them an enormous leg up in figuring out the new Manty tech and evening the odds, and with the size of the SL, they could afford to shotgun the R&D on it and manufacturing of the tech as well.

Zakharra wrote:SL techs and scientists aren't stupid, so the SEM/GA would have to let pieces of tech that could work fall into SL hands. Even if the pieces are defective (bad manufacturing) it would teach them something valuable and give them an enormous leg up in figuring out the new Manty tech and evening the odds, and with the size of the SL, they could afford to shotgun the R&D on it and manufacturing of the tech as well.

Perhaps Haven could release "Charles" from durance vile and send him to sell The Crippler(tm) to the SLN and selected SDFs.

Perhaps carefully edited reports on Fearless' weapons fit at Basilisk Station could be leaked so that TWWSNBN and energy torpedoes look like war winning weapons.

There are a lot of dead-end technologies that enterprising con-men, like "Charles", could peddle all over the Solarian League without compromising any useful GA tech.

It could be a way to draw out or even track the alignment as we know they have their hooks in the league and they would love to get mantle tech for themselves. We know they are behind the scene people, but something as tempting as this could allow them to force them to react, instead of calling out the plays for themselves.

[quote="Valen123456"]I been having some thoughts on the future story-lines of the series and a slightly crazy idea has come to me. Currently the massive tech advantage Manticore and Haven now share over the SLN is one of the big game pieces in the plot right now. I have been wondering how Manticore might try to use this and a slight crazy intelligence scheme popped into my head (albeit one worthy of the Manpower Incident in its potential to backfire).

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Occasional character Charles has done just this with Haven (CPS era) and the Andies. But as others have speculated, Sollie engineers are not stupid, Battle Fleet Admirals may be but not the engineers.
I suspect the Sollies will replicate the LAC's first following the Havenite pattern -- take a high accel pinnace, assault shuttle or dispatch boat and strip out all unnecessary items, then re-arm.
Micro-fusion plants will take a while longer.

-- Stewart

Weird Harold wrote:

Zakharra wrote:SL techs and scientists aren't stupid, so the SEM/GA would have to let pieces of tech that could work fall into SL hands. Even if the pieces are defective (bad manufacturing) it would teach them something valuable and give them an enormous leg up in figuring out the new Manty tech and evening the odds, and with the size of the SL, they could afford to shotgun the R&D on it and manufacturing of the tech as well.

Perhaps Haven could release "Charles" from durance vile and send him to sell The Crippler(tm) to the SLN and selected SDFs.

Perhaps carefully edited reports on Fearless' weapons fit at Basilisk Station could be leaked so that TWWSNBN and energy torpedoes look like war winning weapons.

There are a lot of dead-end technologies that enterprising con-men, like "Charles", could peddle all over the Solarian League without compromising any useful GA tech.

The Sollie techs and scientists might surprise you. Remember the inertial compensator that Grayson made was because they took a development route everyone else knew wouldn't work. But the Graysons made it work and ended up with a compensator 15-30%(or more) more effective than the then best inertial compensator the SKM had even with the lower tech the Graysons had. Given enough time, the SL techs and scientists will come up with technical alternatives to equal the disparity, or at least reduce it by a lot, and very likely come up with technology that surpasses what the GA has.

The weapons outfit of the Fearless might be made into a long range missile that can equal what the SEM/GA missiles can do (honestly, not even the SLN leadership is thinking of using just short ranged weapons like grazers and energy torpedoes in the face of the missile storms at the ranges they now have confirmed data on. They will be pushing heavily for better missiles and missile defenses and better ECM over everything else). And the red herring weapons/tech that might be slipped to the SL as viable tech might come back to bite the GA on the ass as a weapon the SL managed to make work.

Zakharra wrote: The weapons outfit of the Fearless might be made into a long range missile that can equal what the SEM/GA missiles can do (honestly, not even the SLN leadership is thinking of using just short ranged weapons like grazers and energy torpedoes in the face of the missile storms at the ranges they now have confirmed data on. They will be pushing heavily for better missiles and missile defenses and better ECM over everything else). And the red herring weapons/tech that might be slipped to the SL as viable tech might come back to bite the GA on the ass as a weapon the SL managed to make work.

If you mean The Weapon That Shall Not Be Named, David has stated unequivocally that it cannot be installed on anything smaller than a light cruiser. Missiles and drones also cannot carry energy torpedos. I'm not sure what you mean by using the Fearless weapons outfit for a long-range weapon. The only long range weapons the Fearless had were single-drive cruiser-weight missiles, which are not even as long range or powerful as the Cataphract.

stewart wrote:Occasional character Charles has done just this with Haven (CPS era) and the Andies. But as others have speculated, Sollie engineers are not stupid, Battle Fleet Admirals may be but not the engineers.
I suspect the Sollies will replicate the LAC's first following the Havenite pattern -- take a high accel pinnace, assault shuttle or dispatch boat and strip out all unnecessary items, then re-arm.
Micro-fusion plants will take a while longer.

-- Stewart

After having a reread of "Lets go to Prague" i have had another thought, a short story of someone coming up with my mad little scheme in a self-aggrandizing / profit inspired move, and some other intelligence folks get up to a lot of hijinks in a desperate bid to stop them.

Whilst they might just go ahead for new LACs, they also have not had the chance to be exposed to the LAC and CLAC concept all that much except 11th Fleets little blunder. Most of their efforts will most likely be on closing the weapons gap, but it is possible that some more feasibility minded engineers might go for expanding the LAC concept as a prelude to better things (a way of saying "hey we can really help save the SLN, look what we did").

Agreed though, this little tech squabble is the ideal time to bring Charles back into the picture and finally get some real answers on who/what/why he is.

Valen123456 wrote:

stewart wrote:Occasional character Charles has done just this with Haven (CPS era) and the Andies. But as others have speculated, Sollie engineers are not stupid, Battle Fleet Admirals may be but not the engineers.
I suspect the Sollies will replicate the LAC's first following the Havenite pattern -- take a high accel pinnace, assault shuttle or dispatch boat and strip out all unnecessary items, then re-arm.
Micro-fusion plants will take a while longer.

-- Stewart

After having a reread of "Lets go to Prague" i have had another thought, a short story of someone coming up with my mad little scheme in a self-aggrandizing / profit inspired move, and some other intelligence folks get up to a lot of hijinks in a desperate bid to stop them.

Whilst they might just go ahead for new LACs, they also have not had the chance to be exposed to the LAC and CLAC concept all that much except 11th Fleets little blunder. Most of their efforts will most likely be on closing the weapons gap, but it is possible that some more feasibility minded engineers might go for expanding the LAC concept as a prelude to better things (a way of saying "hey we can really help save the SLN, look what we did").

Agreed though, this little tech squabble is the ideal time to bring Charles back into the picture and finally get some real answers on who/what/why he is.

Agreed. The SLN hasn't been exposed to the offensive capabilities of modern LACs, with 11th Fleet only encountering them in a defensive role. Quite different from the PN/RHN, which had a DN-strength system picket wiped out by a surprise LAC attack.

Battle Fleet is also big-minded - they focus almost(if not completely!) exclusively on waller tactics. All the losses they've suffered were at the hands of ship or pod launched multi-drive missiles, which might just colour their perception of the new tactical environment a bit.

On the other hand, they certainly don't have time to R&D and build new ships, again using the RHN as a template. The RHN had a decade of real operational experience, full access to after-action reports(which the SLN is still in the process of receiving), seasoned personnel AND a ceasefire, yet needed four years to reach a position of strategical parity.

Frontier Fleet is where things may be different. I can't remember if Roszak and Barregos' use of local shipbuilders was particularly unprecedented - if any surprises are coming from the SLN, it's probably going to be in the frontier regions.