Theemile wrote:I expect the SLN's first Tech advancements will be ... stilted to say the least. We know there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies with developed the trying to sell it to the SLN.
The first thing I would do as the SLN leadership is find out who sold what to the Havenites in the 1st war, and look to field any improvements in that field and what, if any, could lead to a MDM.
It's another issue of swallowing pride, but what the Havenites needed and asked for would be a valuable lesson for them. The SLN suffers from simply having no idea what modern warfare demands. They've had tech advances over the last few decades that they know are useful - other people have been doing dramatic things with this fancy "laserhead" widget! - but they've got no practice with them, no idea how to work them or prioritize (e.g.) attack birds versus EW ones, EW refinements, how many missiles to mission-kill what, etc.
Haven, by contrast, has had a fairly crappy tech base and in many ways still does, by comparison, but they know better than anyone (even Manticore), how to use what they have in war nowadays. (Call it the Foraker Tradition.) More than anything else, the SLN needs that, but it's something you only get with experience or wild staffing luck that you know how to treasure and cultivate when it pops up.
The second thing I would do is call back EVERYONE who submitted a proposal over the last 2 decades - we know that a company developed that stealth killer missile used on the Queen Adrianne, which was turned down by the SLN - like the Laser Head before.
Probably only 1 in 10 items will be deployable, and 1 in 10 of those will have any real use.
And the SLN may have a sketchy ability to identify which 1 in 10, in both cases.
Most of those that will work will be ... asymmetric to modern warfare. A new kind of stealth or ECM perhaps. A new short ranged weapon or missile killer. Something potentially different and revolutionary.
In a way, that's not unlike the position of the Mesan Alignment Navy. Oh, they've worked out doctrine for the spider drive and developed things specifically to use with it. And they're well aware of its limitations and are keen to learn all they can from people with other tricks and/or more fighting practice. But in some ways, they look to have been in the position of working out military applications for two basic advances that came out of fundamental research rather than research driven by military demands. They get revolutionary stuff because hey look, it's suddenly in our toolkit, let's make violence with it.
Manticore and Project Gram are an excellent contrast for that. Gram went looking for things for specific military applications, got them, and pushed them in all the violent application directions they could find, building on a foundation of existing military practice. (Plus the wildcard of the Grayson inertial compensator.)
The question as always will be will the SLN have time to find, refine, and deploy these new technologies.
And I think the answer will be not in any quantity, in the time they will be allowed.
Yes. On the other hand, any or all of them may contribute to a less stable interstellar order after the League falls. Everyone has to be afraid of the weird, unpredictable monsters coming out of old League-funded labs, in the hands of new and themselves unstable, fearful states.
