Could the SLN do this?

HB of CJ wrote:saber964, Thank you. I was alluding to the entry of WW2 by the USA, not the beginning of the Tojo government of Japan. When the Japanese ran wild in China there was no world war ... yet.

And ... by definition, for a war to be considered to be a world war, nations from all over may be involved. Thus the band wagon after Dec. 1941 when most everybody got involved until VJ day.

It depends on your definition of what constitutes a world war look at WWI. Except for some battles in east Africa the pursuit of the SMS Edmend and Adm. Graf Spee across the Pacific most if not all fighting took place in Europe. The vast majority of countries were never really impacted by the war.

Again I hijacked this thread. Sorry. Getting me back on track here, could the above first suggestion also be used to seed important SL planets and places with stealth mines?

Could such gadgets be made that are cloaked enough and are fast enough to sense, target, lock on to, run down and damage a warship enough that it could not hyper back out?

I am thinking of the time required for the Sollie League to spin up to speed with military infrastructure. Could something be thrown together quickly to interdict key Sollie places?

This might buy time for the Sollies to get their acts together. The Grand Alliances does not have enough modern or other missles to knock out even a small percentage of Sollie stuff.

How many big shipyards did the Allies eventually have in WW2 just here on planet Earth? Now multiply by over 2000. Just the USA in less than 4 years destroyed the worlds 2nd largest navy.

saber964 wrote:

HB of CJ wrote:saber964, Thank you. I was alluding to the entry of WW2 by the USA, not the beginning of the Tojo government of Japan. When the Japanese ran wild in China there was no world war ... yet.

And ... by definition, for a war to be considered to be a world war, nations from all over may be involved. Thus the band wagon after Dec. 1941 when most everybody got involved until VJ day.

It depends on your definition of what constitutes a world war look at WWI. Except for some battles in east Africa the pursuit of the SMS Edmend and Adm. Graf Spee across the Pacific most if not all fighting took place in Europe. The vast majority of countries were never really impacted by the war.

You can also define a conflict as a world war if it ranges across the world by the time it ends, and date that conflict as a war from the time it begins. By those standards, 1937 is the latest likely date for a beginning. 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria would be a real contender, since Japan and China didn't have a condition you can call "peace" after that and before 1945.

Pick your definitions and stick with them, and expect other people to exercise the same freedom. If everyone's interested in clear communication, definitions will be clear and maybe even shared. If not, not.

saber964 wrote:It depends on your definition of what constitutes a world war look at WWI. Except for some battles in east Africa the pursuit of the SMS Edmend and Adm. Graf Spee across the Pacific most if not all fighting took place in Europe. The vast majority of countries were never really impacted by the war.

WWI is fairly instructive for the implementation of HB of CJ's idea. Unlike WWII none of the belligerents had been mobilizing for war before August of 1914, and several belligerents had problems with a shell shortage in mid 1915. Since they ran through their pre-war stockpiles by that point and had yet to fully ramp up production. Full production for France and Britian would not come untill 1916, although some of the increase in production was felt at the front by the latter half of 1915. In WWII all of the major powers were increasing their production of military equipment by 1938 at the latest.

War has broken out, the SL is still building war material in peacetime mode, how long will it take them to mobilize?

Perhaps DW will tell. Could go either way, or someplace in the middle. I think the Sollie League is just so big that it might take little time at all to produce meaningful totals of needful stuff.

Just a little bit to begin with from many systems. Then more. Then at some uncertain point when things and notions comes together, an absolute flood of war material. Then they get their act together.

At that point, if they wanted to, Sollie war effort would and could completely crush the Grand Alliance. The question is will this happen in the next long awaited HH books? Dunno fur sures. HB

HB of CJ wrote:Perhaps DW will tell. Could go either way, or someplace in the middle. I think the Sollie League is just so big that it might take little time at all to produce meaningful totals of needful stuff.

Just a little bit to begin with from many systems. Then more. Then at some uncertain point when things and notions comes together, an absolute flood of war material. Then they get their act together.

At that point, if they wanted to, Sollie war effort would and could completely crush the Grand Alliance. The question is will this happen in the next long awaited HH books? Dunno fur sures. HB

Could also happen much like the Russian Empire in WWI, They were never able to fully mobilize. Combinations of entrenched corruption, a multitude of transportation bottlenecks and sheer lack of capacity prevented the Russian army from being self sufficient in artillery in WWI and by some accounts small arms was only a little better. Production did increase, but always remained insufficient to needs, and by the time the various logistics hurdles were being addressed, resources were either occupied by Germany, or the empire collapsed.

HB of CJ wrote:Perhaps DW will tell. Could go either way, or someplace in the middle. I think the Sollie League is just so big that it might take little time at all to produce meaningful totals of needful stuff.

Just a little bit to begin with from many systems. Then more. Then at some uncertain point when things and notions comes together, an absolute flood of war material. Then they get their act together.

At that point, if they wanted to, Sollie war effort would and could completely crush the Grand Alliance. The question is will this happen in the next long awaited HH books? Dunno fur sures. HB

The problem is the assumption that the Solarian League is a state that can be treated as a single rational agent with goals it can make effective and reasonable command of the resources of the star systems that are members or protectorates of it. It's not.

It's huge. It's fabulously wealthy and advanced. We can spend all day throwing superlatives at those descriptions and we won't get the job done. And it doesn't matter.

The League's able to do things as the League precisely as far as system governments let the central government do them - or volunteer to do them themselves, outside the League's political structure. Heck, the League bureaucracy itself is effectively the result of those system governments allowing some organizations to exist and act under the League's aegis just because they're taking trivial proportions of resources and exercising - over those full-fledged League member systems - trivial amounts of power.

The League government is running on the spare change - the stuff under the couch cushions! - of two thousand star systems. And it's allowed to spend it just so long as it doesn't do anything with it that the parents really mind.

Granted, the parents have gotten a bit, well, stupid over time. They figure the kids have to be well-meaning, or can't really get into serious trouble, because hey, they're just kids. Unfortunately, it seems the kids have gotten drunk and crashed the family's superdreadnoughts into 10th Fleet and then Manticore and the neighbors are complaining. And now the kids are threatening one of the parents, Beowulf, when it's telling them to pipe down and go to their rooms.

The parents have gotten a bit stupid, but they are going to be waking up and cutting off the kids themselves. And it's those parents, those system governments, who'd be bankrolling - or at least hosting, permitting, and supporting - the thousand weapon programs the "Solarian League" could possibly launch.

They're plentiful, rich, and mighty, but with this kind of behavior on the part of a League government that has been operating on the fiscal spare change and legal after-thoughts of the real governments, it's not likely they will remain the Solarian League.

HB of CJ wrote:Perhaps DW will tell. Could go either way, or someplace in the middle. I think the Sollie League is just so big that it might take little time at all to produce meaningful totals of needful stuff.

I don't think so. Basically, nine women can't have a baby in one month.

If the SLN had a decade without fighting to catch up, the Grand Alliance would be in serious trouble, but I think it's pretty clear the SLN is in too deep of a hole to get out of. The SLN has a much larger economy to draw on, but Haven alone probably has more warship building capacity than the SLN currently. And the Grand Alliance's building capacity will increase faster the League's for the next few years (Manticore's replacement shipyards will come online, Grayson's probably will*, the Erewhon/Maya yards will ramp up to full capital ship capability, Haven and Beowulf -- and to a lesser extent the Andermani -- will upgrade their yards to Manticoran Alliance levels), while we have no textev for the SLN increasing its current limited warship building capacity at all, anywhere. And since the current League government's ability to create a 'bolthole' is very poor (the SLN leaks secrets like a sieve), any new SLN yard can easily be destroyed before it's completed. Right now the Grand Alliance has roughly 1000 SD(P)s and the SLN has none. Before the SLN has one, the Grand Alliance will have hundreds more even if they don't systematically take out the SLN's yards; if they do, the SLN will not even get to one (unless some rump remnant of the League post-war keeps the Solarian League name).

Meanwhile, an SD(P) built using the best tech the SLN has or could get from the Alignment would still be notably inferior to first-gen Havenite SD(P)s (of which the Grand Alliance has quite a lot of, though I don't think we have numbers on how Haven's fleet breaks down on Sovereign of Spaces vs Temeraires). That's nowhere near good enough to face 2nd-gen Havenite SD(P)s, let alone the hundreds of SD(P)s with Apollo that the Grand Alliance already has (really, no one, not even Manticore, has anything that can defend against Apollo; until some future defensive tech comes online, Apollo-equipped fleets facing each other would be essentially courting mutual suicide ala old-school energy range duels).

And then you've got a very weak and very limited League government trying to fight a war when any system with any sense is trying to secede and I just don't see it possibly going well for them.

* No textev for this, and I've argued it's unnecessary, but it's unlikely Graysons would be convinced of this.

JeffEngel wrote:...

The parents have gotten a bit stupid, but they are going to be waking up and cutting off the kids themselves. And it's those parents, those system governments, who'd be bankrolling - or at least hosting, permitting, and supporting - the thousand weapon programs the "Solarian League" could possibly launch.

They're plentiful, rich, and mighty, but with this kind of behavior on the part of a League government that has been operating on the fiscal spare change and legal after-thoughts of the real governments, it's not likely they will remain the Solarian League.

Good post.

The most prominent example is Beowulf's taking on missile production for Manticore instead of turning their formidable industrial and economic strength to the salvation of the SLN and League.

As far as the original question: Yes the SLN can do just about anything you can imagine -- IF they to survive long enough. With the defection of Beowulf and the planned defections of Maya and the Renaissance Factor triggering an "every man for himself" mindset, the SLN/SL doesn't have time to even field significant numbers of cataphract missiles, let alone major ship modifications or new ships.

Castenea wrote:War has broken out, the SL is still building war material in peacetime mode, how long will it take them to mobilize?

The RMN expects to go from having no industry at all to producing modern ships in two years. Since most systems didn't have someone blow up their entire industrial base that's pretty much an upper limit. Though having an effective ship design might still be an issue.