Infrastructure Raid Targets.

icspots wrote:Does it even benefit the GA to go after the mothballed Battle Fleet SDs? At some point Hamish iirc made a comment of how there was still a large portion of the reserve equipped with auto-cannon vs PDLC. Even when updated to "modern" standards they aren't survivable in the current combat environment.... at least not against anyone with MDMs. They're big, soak up a ton of manpower with their designs, and they don't pose much of a threat to any of the GA's modern fleets. If they went out and destroyed them all at drydock then it would just force the SL to build new and better ships that are more survivable and which likely will have more automation (though not necessarily). While there's been textev that the SL knows it needs new designs (I'm remembering a conversation between Kingsford and the Mandarins about his plans for FF raiding forces) there has got to be some pressure somewhere of not letting the reserve go to waste. As long as it's there then there's potential for it to drain away significant resources in manpower and refitting which could be better put towards modernizing the SLN.

Granted there's still a lot of trouble even obsolete designs can pose against opponents who don't have modern hardware. Just see Terkhov and the Battle of Hyacinth.

There's that last point. And when the conflict ranges over the entirety of the League and Grand Alliance systems, there are so many, many points at which any warship may be used without coming up against any other warship. That's a horrible waste of wallers and crews, but the League has made it this long based on being able to afford waste and it may be able to afford a bit more a bit longer.

It's shorter on morale and time. For morale, it's got systems that are waking up to the weaknesses of the SLN, the control they do not have over their own government while remaining within it, and the vulnerability of their economies - the interstellar portion at least, something they can live without but really, really would rather not. For time, it's got OFS protectorates falling off when GA fleets come to call or when Barregos feels his time has come, and one Core World and counting just opting out, with the central government pressured to Do Something but not chalk up another defeat when it does.

Even using reactivated reserve ships where they avoid coming against any modern enemy warship would be something that would actually happen too late to save the League. The Reserve represents psychological/propaganda advantage (so long as people don't realize the time issue or how horribly ineffective it is) that may be deflated by being destroyed, but that destruction may invite a good chance of the SEM looking like the villains of the piece and making people either cling to the League in the face of the dangerous barbarians, and/or plan to get the barbarians back even if they need to use post-League successor state(s) to do it a generation down the road.

--snipping--

JeffEngel wrote:The Reserve represents psychological/propaganda advantage (so long as people don't realize the time issue or how horribly ineffective it is)

Keeping in mind that it required a senator from Missouri to actually get out into a vehicle and kick some arses back in the home system of Washington DC to stop the military graft and corruption to even get the troops fed and equipped properly even after the USA was firmly embeddded into WWII. Then put that on an interstellar scale, where "the home team" is actually the origin of the problem.

I think that "not upgrading but rebuilding" or "upgrading to fighting standards" is entirely the point which will bring the GA victory and the SL to ruin. The GA actually spends the money they say they do on useful things like extended range missiles, highly automated, fast, and stealthy ships, upgrades to PDLC, ECM, FTL on everything including recon drones, etc.

Yet SD wise, 9000 ships in, the SLN has not. The average star system and their populaces have been told for decades "we need all this money to build..."

Bureacratic family bank accounts, sweetheart deals and graft. Good for HD screens and bridge setups that don't let their captains and admirals make quick decisions on our latest greatest...

Paper tigers. Now the bureaucrats have to go back to the SL assembly and say "oh, remember all that money we wasted? we want to go tax your citizens directly so we can build really good tigers this time. No, we don't actually have the tech or know how to do it in the short term, but we promise we'll be good with the money this time... Scout's honor!"

SharkHunter wrote:--snipping--

JeffEngel wrote:The Reserve represents psychological/propaganda advantage (so long as people don't realize the time issue or how horribly ineffective it is)

Keeping in mind that it required a senator from Missouri to actually get out into a vehicle and kick some arses back in the home system of Washington DC to stop the military graft and corruption to even get the troops fed and equipped properly even after the USA was firmly embeddded into WWII. Then put that on an interstellar scale, where "the home team" is actually the origin of the problem.

I think that "not upgrading but rebuilding" or "upgrading to fighting standards" is entirely the point which will bring the GA victory and the SL to ruin. The GA actually spends the money they say they do on useful things like extended range missiles, highly automated, fast, and stealthy ships, upgrades to PDLC, ECM, FTL on everything including recon drones, etc.

Yet SD wise, 9000 ships in, the SLN has not. The average star system and their populaces have been told for decades "we need all this money to build..."

Bureacratic family bank accounts, sweetheart deals and graft. Good for HD screens and bridge setups that don't let their captains and admirals make quick decisions on our latest greatest...

Paper tigers. Now the bureaucrats have to go back to the SL assembly and say "oh, remember all that money we wasted? we want to go tax your citizens directly so we can build really good tigers this time. No, we don't actually have the tech or know how to do it in the short term, but we promise we'll be good with the money this time... Scout's honor!"

SharkHunter has a good point here. It is going to be politically infeasible to ask for direct taxation to replace or upgrade the ships in the reserve, simply because of all of the previous propaganda about the ISLN. The only way that they will get that approval is if the reserve gets blown away - because then the argument is "we need the money to replace the ships that the Manties cravenly destroyed in their mooring docks", with no need to explain that those ships were in fact worthless piles of crap. So while it might be tempting to attack the reserve fleets, it might well be better to leave them alone, and instead go after active ships and bases.

fallsfromtrees wrote:SharkHunter has a good point here. It is going to be politically infeasible to ask for direct taxation to replace or upgrade the ships in the reserve, simply because of all of the previous propaganda about the ISLN. The only way that they will get that approval is if the reserve gets blown away - because then the argument is "we need the money to replace the ships that the Manties cravenly destroyed in their mooring docks", with no need to explain that those ships were in fact worthless piles of crap. So while it might be tempting to attack the reserve fleets, it might well be better to leave them alone, and instead go after active ships and bases.

I disagree you should destroy any mothballed SLN ship that you get into your sight. 1. You save ammunition. An active SLN SD will need 200 or so missiles to be destroyed. An inactive one can be destroyed at your leisure with energy weapons. 2. You would save the lives of the crew, which would man that SD. 3. SLN leadership is shown to be incompetent. (We have been at war for almost a year and we have SD still in storage and unprotected. How big an idiot are you) 4. It would increase the pressure to man the remaining reserve flotilla, there by wasting resources. 5. It would decrease the likelihood that the SLN would be able to win an engagement with overwhelming numbers.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

icspots wrote:Does it even benefit the GA to go after the mothballed Battle Fleet SDs? At some point Hamish iirc made a comment of how there was still a large portion of the reserve equipped with auto-cannon vs PDLC. Even when updated to "modern" standards they aren't survivable in the current combat environment.... at least not against anyone with MDMs. They're big, soak up a ton of manpower with their designs, and they don't pose much of a threat to any of the GA's modern fleets. If they went out and destroyed them all at drydock then it would just force the SL to build new and better ships that are more survivable and which likely will have more automation (though not necessarily). While there's been textev that the SL knows it needs new designs (I'm remembering a conversation between Kingsford and the Mandarins about his plans for FF raiding forces) there has got to be some pressure somewhere of not letting the reserve go to waste. As long as it's there then there's potential for it to drain away significant resources in manpower and refitting which could be better put towards modernizing the SLN.

Granted there's still a lot of trouble even obsolete designs can pose against opponents who don't have modern hardware. Just see Terkhov and the Battle of Hyacinth.

Well there is obsolete and then there is OBSOLETE. The Peep ships at Hyacinth were far more up to date than anything in the Sollie closet, and Terekov had older model ships - the newer ones were with Eighth fleet, tearing up the Peep systems in the Buttercup offense.

Um..... you do realize that Terekhov had 3 of the newest RMN Light Cruisers under his command @ Hyacinth? The problem was he was facing CAs and BCs while trying to protect a Fleet Train. If you want to classify Hyacinth as modern vs obsolete, you really must classify the whole war as that way. It was tech vs numbers the whole way.

Torlek wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:SharkHunter has a good point here. It is going to be politically infeasible to ask for direct taxation to replace or upgrade the ships in the reserve, simply because of all of the previous propaganda about the ISLN. The only way that they will get that approval is if the reserve gets blown away - because then the argument is "we need the money to replace the ships that the Manties cravenly destroyed in their mooring docks", with no need to explain that those ships were in fact worthless piles of crap. So while it might be tempting to attack the reserve fleets, it might well be better to leave them alone, and instead go after active ships and bases.

I disagree you should destroy any mothballed SLN ship that you get into your sight. 1. You save ammunition. An active SLN SD will need 200 or so missiles to be destroyed. An inactive one can be destroyed at your leisure with energy weapons. 2. You would save the lives of the crew, which would man that SD. 3. SLN leadership is shown to be incompetent. (We have been at war for almost a year and we have SD still in storage and unprotected. How big an idiot are you) 4. It would increase the pressure to man the remaining reserve flotilla, there by wasting resources. 5. It would decrease the likelihood that the SLN would be able to win an engagement with overwhelming numbers.

Interesting discussion from both of you, good points on both sides.

But to borrow a thought from fallsfromtrees, there is obsolete and OBSOLETE.

And what is obsolete for any modern naval force would cut a major swath through Verge and Protectorate systems that are not close to the action (say, on the other side of the SL from the GA and with no wormholes within 100LY). So if you're and enterprising conqueror and have enough people to man a couple of ancient SD's you've hijacked (bought under the table), you may think you can set up a nice little empire that is so far away from the GA that they won't bother you.

If you think that is far-fetched, remember Warneckiout in Marsh...and think someone three times as mego-manicial....

So at minimum I would secure the mothballed wallers and probably let the LACs use their Alpha Nodes for target practice.

[/quote]
Actually there is some textev for this interpretation. The short story A Call to Arms in the 6th anthology (and the epilogue to the first book in the series that it spawned) shows the Axelrod corporation attempting to seize the Manticore WH before it is recognized, to the great benefit of the corporation itself.[/quote]

I did go back and look. It only describers Axelrod as a star spanning mega corporation. Nothing about where it is headquartered but the office/branch mentioned is on Beowulf. What they are just starting is the research on Manticore because one analyst has found what MIGHT be a wormhole relative to the Manticore system (because they now have a much better set of insterments and ways of looking at data and have found something that could be a wormhole). We know from later (in the time-line) stories that Axelrod hires a mercenary fleet (well, squadron) to attach Manticore. I didn' go reread the story on that part but the premise is that capturing or subjugating Manticore would leet Axelrod "discover" the wormhole after setting up an arrangemnt with the "new" government of Manticore. Don't know what the form of the new government was going to take or it was going to follow future form of Transtellar control but without OFS (which wasn't involved yet).

The questions remain:
1) Who ones Yeldin?

2) Does a Transstellar (or any company) have to be tied to or formed under the laws of a Star Nation?

It is POSSIBLE that the entity that is Technodyne is a Corporate State the same way Beowulf is described, just it is not located on planet/in a system that has a habital planet.

If the SL requires its members to be/have a habitable planet, there are a couple of thoughts. One is that they had- at some time, including prior to the formation of the SL- problems with the equevlent Corporate States without planets acting as Nation States including demanding they types of Nation State treatment like Embasys, Diplomatic Status etc. That they might have a Corporate Navy is a different discussion.

At the moment, here on Earth, there are several places you can form a company under the laws of a number of small nations and be protected from a lot of things and bar individuals, businesses and Nations (or the governments there of) from getting any information. Switzerland is one. The Cayman Islands, one or more of the Channel Islands off England. Lots of things. There are also places like Panama and Libia that provide a source of registration of vessels (flagging) that have the similar protections. The last two mostly are very inexpensive ways of avoiding taxes and paying lower fees. The first batch shields companies from public and government scrutiny of banking and all sorts of business dealing that the owners don't want known to anybody.

Manticore appears to have been originaly chartered on Earth (if someone has more info like it was done in the Cayman's or some tiny nation on the Moon, please let us know) but at some point, the entity evolved into the Star Kingdom of Manticore and is self embodies on Manticore with initially the ownership of the entire Star System. That is and has always been IF they could defend themselves both in the military sense and in the political and economic sense of maintaining independence and control of what they held.

I am going to guess that companies like Technodyne are still going to have to pay taxes and obey the laws of planets (and systems) in which they have facilities just the way multi-national companies now do on Earth. So far I don't recall the transstellars having extra legal (treaty imposed) rights to property and operations in Star Nations such as modern diplomatic mission or treaty based military locations in other Nations on Earth now.
The whole discussion of OFS, Transtellars and the legion of problems with OFS Protectorates is not the same.

n7axw wrote:The subject of attacking Sol has been discussed, I think, in ART. An actual attack on Old Earth has been ruled out on the basis it would provide a powerful emotional rallying point for the rest of the League. What is a bit fuzzy in my own mind is if this includes the rest of the Sol system. For example one of the League's big fleet basis is in orbit around Mars. I am not sure that the conversation would have included that or not. But for certain, no attack on Old Earth.

Don

I have been involved front and center with this argument ad nauseum since years ago and so I won't rehash old points of logic however this is a space series and direct comparisons to examples of land offensives sometimes just don't compare. If attacking the Sol system would be the worst thing possible for the GA to do then why not just say they did and get the best of both worlds? They've lied before and will lie again and the "man on the street" PREFERS to believe what is fed to them. And after all isn't it these same people that the GA not inflame? THEY have no "eyes" out in space and can't confirm or deny one way or the other. Impose hardships on them (which probably will have to be done anyway) and claim it is a result of a barbarous attack on the Sol System. Chances are the people will WANT to believe that is the case. The GA's tactics and strategy shouldn't be concerned with how angry Sol's population might become. The never have before...

Hutch wrote:[snip]
And what is obsolete for any modern naval force would cut a major swath through Verge and Protectorate systems that are not close to the action (say, on the other side of the SL from the GA and with no wormholes within 100LY). So if you're and enterprising conqueror and have enough people to man a couple of ancient SD's you've hijacked (bought under the table), you may think you can set up a nice little empire that is so far away from the GA that they won't bother you.
...
So at minimum I would secure the mothballed wallers and probably let the LACs use their Alpha Nodes for target practice.

Could the GA secure the reserve with BC(P)s or SagCs in stealth picketing them for reactivation, prepared to pick off any that start to move? That would deprive the SL of the propaganda benefits of destroying it outright while ensuring nobody makes off with a capability to make mischief.

JeffEngel wrote:

icspots wrote:Does it even benefit the GA to go after the mothballed Battle Fleet SDs? At some point Hamish iirc made a comment of how there was still a large portion of the reserve equipped with auto-cannon vs PDLC. Even when updated to "modern" standards they aren't survivable in the current combat environment.... at least not against anyone with MDMs. They're big, soak up a ton of manpower with their designs, and they don't pose much of a threat to any of the GA's modern fleets. If they went out and destroyed them all at drydock then it would just force the SL to build new and better ships that are more survivable and which likely will have more automation (though not necessarily). While there's been textev that the SL knows it needs new designs (I'm remembering a conversation between Kingsford and the Mandarins about his plans for FF raiding forces) there has got to be some pressure somewhere of not letting the reserve go to waste. As long as it's there then there's potential for it to drain away significant resources in manpower and refitting which could be better put towards modernizing the SLN.

Granted there's still a lot of trouble even obsolete designs can pose against opponents who don't have modern hardware. Just see Terkhov and the Battle of Hyacinth.

There's that last point. And when the conflict ranges over the entirety of the League and Grand Alliance systems, there are so many, many points at which any warship may be used without coming up against any other warship. That's a horrible waste of wallers and crews, but the League has made it this long based on being able to afford waste and it may be able to afford a bit more a bit longer.

It's shorter on morale and time. For morale, it's got systems that are waking up to the weaknesses of the SLN, the control they do not have over their own government while remaining within it, and the vulnerability of their economies - the interstellar portion at least, something they can live without but really, really would rather not. For time, it's got OFS protectorates falling off when GA fleets come to call or when Barregos feels his time has come, and one Core World and counting just opting out, with the central government pressured to Do Something but not chalk up another defeat when it does.

Even using reactivated reserve ships where they avoid coming against any modern enemy warship would be something that would actually happen too late to save the League. The Reserve represents psychological/propaganda advantage (so long as people don't realize the time issue or how horribly ineffective it is) that may be deflated by being destroyed, but that destruction may invite a good chance of the SEM looking like the villains of the piece and making people either cling to the League in the face of the dangerous barbarians, and/or plan to get the barbarians back even if they need to use post-League successor state(s) to do it a generation down the road.

-----------------

There is a good argument that Pearl Harbor brutally cleared the way for the CV to be the primary capital ship of WWII instead of the BB. Battles of Coral Sea and Midway emphasized the point.

One option is to let the SLN tie up resources trying to modernize their reserve fleet.

If new construction is targeted (or new construction yards) it would potentially force the SLN to rely on the slow and obsolete.

-- Stewart