Question about Beowulf tactics

kzt wrote:

StealthSeeker wrote:If I remember correctly, operation buttercup was the first use of the SD(P) class of ships and the first use of dual drive MDM missiles, which I think would have made them the Mk16 missiles not the Mk23. So some older ships may have been refitted for the Mk16, but maybe not for the larger Mk23. Henke is using older SD(P)s and all she has in Mk16 missiles. (I think)

No, mk23 and mk16s are contemporaries. The old missile has a designation in HoS, but that is the only place I've seen it. it is a full mdm.

Henke's older SD(p)'s can still fire the Mk 23 - they just cann't use the mk23 D/E in Apollo mode. Onl the original ~80 IAN Adler SD(p)s built interwar are limited to the Mk 41s because they canot initiate Fusion pods in the pod bay. Havenite missiles are capacitor as well and their current SD(p)s will probably have the same restriction as the original Adlers. the 40 2nd war built Adlers were modified in the yards to use Fusion pods/missiles and have KH2 for Apollo control.

Lets take a deep breath.

IF the story line alters at any point after the High Ridge debacle and Haven captures the Manticore System, the Republic of Haven gets ALL of the SEM's tech. ALL OF IT.
Since they are then probably not going to then get clobbered by Oyster Bay when it happens in our original time-line. The original operaton that was to be the much larger version of Oyster Bay included haven but would have included Manticore ONLY as a subject of Haven. The original OB was to primarily kill Haven (and all of it's subject system's infrastructures AFTER the SLN was mortally wounded.
Having captured Manticore, Haven would be able to start both taking over surviving RMN ships, the shipyards, and the R&D. Haven would NOT have been interested in destroying the three major stations (one for each inhabited world), just taking control of the orbitals and demanding surrender. That would have left the majority of the infrastructure and manufacturing -including the military constructon yards and eqipment manufaturing intact.

Just how long do you think it would take Haven to suck out ALL of the tech and lines of research and start producing ships and weapons from that new information with the "new" construcion ability. They would also graft the new tech into the Haven military construction. They would also have KEPT all the existing ships and weapons they had and keep cranking out new stuff plus upgrading old stuff (as possible without massive retrofitting of "old" tech ships.
Why? Because the older ships were still better than anybody except the now defunct RMN, possibly Erwhon, Grayson (who would probably be next on the conquest list) and the Aldermani.
So, a couple of years down the road, Haven could just be shoveling in new captured systems and able to handle something like Crandall's fleet if the SLN was sent calling. Besides, where would the SLN be going to strike? Probably NOT Talbott Cluster since the wormhole there would not have been on the list of things to keep working on. Haven would hold the Junction and "renegotiate" all of the deals with the systems near the other termini. So SLN would still need to got through Hyper-space to get even to Manticore- then to San Martin (after massive losses at Manticore and then head off in the direction of Haven and having to fight its way all the way there.
That persumes that the Republic of Haven had not put a truly massive fleet through the wormhole to the Sigma Draconis wormhole, to "protect" it (was would be, after all, theirs by right of conquest of Manticore) and use that as a staging ground to pump fleet after fleet into cover that dagger at the heart of the Empire of Haven.

By which time Haven would have probably decided that the only option was to pith the SL and do deep raid attacks at the fleet size level comming at the SL and SLN via the Sigma Draconis portal. Taking or not taking Beowulf wouldn't matter. It would be better to strike at the SLN first and then just dictate to Beowulf since the SLN would be in tatters.

The Alignment would just wet it's panties and watch as Haven did all the hard work and take the losses while shredding the SLN and killing billions of "normal" humans, and accumplishing the destruction that would let the RF do it's intended restructure of the former SL and then use the Lenny Dets to butcher the infrastructer of anybody who made a fuss.

End-Game, the Alignment wins.

Weird Harold wrote:

Vince wrote:The CDs include Kindle compatible files (mobi or prc) with no need to use Calibre to convert.

My Kindle Fire won't recognize .PRC files, and some of the older titles have .LIT ebook formats and Word97 .DOC in place of .RTF.

I haven't tried it, but Kindles may be able to use the HTML files directly.

Converting .doc files to .rtf is trivial if you have a Windows or Linux box (don't know about Mac). Just get a copy of Open Office (openoffice.org) Writer. It will open a .doc file and save it as an .rtf with no problem. Calibre will handle the .prc and .lit files.

fallsfromtrees wrote:Converting .doc files to .rtf is trivial if you have a Windows or Linux box (don't know about Mac). Just get a copy of Open Office ...

Wordpad is included as part of windows and it can read/write both Word97 .DOC and .RTF formats. Most people have something that can convert .DOC to .RTF without needing to download more.

Weird Harold wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:Converting .doc files to .rtf is trivial if you have a Windows or Linux box (don't know about Mac). Just get a copy of Open Office ...

Wordpad is included as part of windows and it can read/write both Word97 .DOC and .RTF formats. Most people have something that can convert .DOC to .RTF without needing to download more.

True for Windoz boxes. Not so true for Linux boxes.

Vince wrote:The CDs include Kindle compatible files (mobi or prc) with no need to use Calibre to convert.

Weird Harold wrote:My Kindle Fire won't recognize .PRC files, and some of the older titles have .LIT ebook formats and Word97 .DOC in place of .RTF.

I haven't tried it, but Kindles may be able to use the HTML files directly.

Jonathan_S wrote:Odd, my various eink Kindles have read them no problem.

(Well, the older prc files don't have metadata, so I just get the filename; rather than title and author. But they still work fine otherwise)


I wonder why the Kindle tablet wasn't handling them as well?
(A quick google search showed some people saying prcs were filed under docs, rather than books; which is also odd.
But worst case calibre should be able to convert one of the various file formats on the CDs into something that pretty much any tablet or ereader can handle.

If you have access to MS Word, you can open the doc files and save them as rtf files. Libre Office (Writer) also can do the same, and I suspect that Open Office's word processor can do it as well.

For the missing metadata from prc files, you can use Calibre to covert the prc files to mobi files and then add the metadata manually. You can also generate chapter marks for the e-ink Kindles (use Calibre to generate a table of contents to get the chapter marks--the drawback is if the title already has a table of contents the new copy will now have two tables of contents--haven't figured out to remove the extra one).

As for the Fire tablets*, they run a different OS (a fork of Android running on top of Linux) while the e-ink Kindles run Linux (OS) with a customized version of Mobi Reader as the application that opens the files it can read.

* Amazon originally called their tablet the Kindle Fire, and later changed the name of the tablet(s) to just Fire as it was confusing their customers having both e-ink readers and LCD tablets with the same 'Kindle' name, but very different capabilities (as a result of the different technologies used in each product family).

Brigade XO wrote:Lets take a deep breath.

IF the story line alters at any point after the High Ridge debacle and Haven captures the Manticore System, the Republic of Haven gets ALL of the SEM's tech. ALL OF IT.

I think that there was only a very small window when your scenario wold have worked out. As anytime after Haven realized that their communications with Manticore during peace talks had been tampered with the outcome would again have been drastically different. If the talks on Torch between Haven and Manticore had taken place Tourville's attack on Manticore would never have happened. Even if Tourville's attack had succeeded, Haven's goal was not what it originally would have been 20 years earlier.

In the end Haven has gotten access to everything that Manticore has in their military arsenal anyway.

So while I like the mental picture of one possibility of events that paint, I don't think they could have possibly have happened. Manty technology and Theisman's actions in Haven have completely upset Mesa's apple cart of careful plans. With the Zilwicki and Cachat revelations the MA plans are further in chaos. If the covert investigation of the death of Admiral "Ram-jet" on Old-Earth bears fruit, things will further fall apart. The MA is toast, but so is the SL in it's current form.

Brigade XO wrote:Lets take a deep breath.

IF the story line alters at any point after the High Ridge debacle and Haven captures the Manticore System, the Republic of Haven gets ALL of the SEM's tech. ALL OF IT.

That's great, but people weren't talking about what would happen if Haven captured Manticore during the Second War. They were talking about what the Haven (and the Alignment) would have done if Haven had captured Manticore at the beginning of the first war. Would Haven have eventually gone after Beowulf? That's the question that was being considered.

SWM wrote:

Brigade XO wrote:Lets take a deep breath.

IF the story line alters at any point after the High Ridge debacle and Haven captures the Manticore System, the Republic of Haven gets ALL of the SEM's tech. ALL OF IT.

That's great, but people weren't talking about what would happen if Haven captured Manticore during the Second War. They were talking about what the Haven (and the Alignment) would have done if Haven had captured Manticore at the beginning of the first war. Would Haven have eventually gone after Beowulf? That's the question that was being considered.

It is indeed, but a lot of the neat stuff that Manticore deployed later was already in the works at the start of the first war, including the FTL comms, and much of Ghost Rider. Haven gets a hold of that. The real question is, does Pierre stage his coup if the first results of the war are more successful than they were.

fallsfromtrees wrote:It is indeed, but a lot of the neat stuff that Manticore deployed later was already in the works at the start of the first war, including the FTL comms, and much of Ghost Rider. Haven gets a hold of that. The real question is, does Pierre stage his coup if the first results of the war are more successful than they were.

It's a while since I read SVW, but I thought that Pierre's coup took place before the results of Hancock and Third Yeltsin reached Nouveau Paris?