League Survival

Sigs wrote:

SWM wrote:Nobody is arguing that Beowulf or any RF system can defeat the entire SLN by themselves. What people are saying is that in the aftermath, no system is going to be facing the entire SLN.

When the League collapses, where do you think the SLN ships will go? Where would their crews go?

They'll be scattered, of course. Which means no single system is going to be facing the entire SLN, just as I said. You're argument about facing the entire SLN is ridiculous.

Sigs wrote:So some nations will form around former SLN naval yards and might get large portions of active SLN ships and reserve SLN ships. So those nations would arguably be able to provide just as much if not more security than the 12 RF systems unless that is the Rf systems have an average of 100 wallers per system then it changes the dynamics.

If you have a mostly operational SD cruiser in your system you have removed yourself from the target list of the average predator. If you have a mostly operational SD squadron even large well organized predators are going to attack you unless they have some sort of massive superiority that allows them to defeat you with minimal damage to yourself.

If you have 20 obsolete LACs that have an availability rate of 60% then you are in a somewhat different position. And the vast majority of SL system are in that position.

The drawback to having people from somewhere else providing you military defense is that the cure might well be worse that the disease. If you are the president for life of 20LACland and Admiral SDsquadron shows up to talk about working together your negotiating position is (militarily at least) pretty weak. If Admiral SDsquardon decides he'd rather by president for life you are going to have a very big problem (but probably not for very long...).

However if another well armed polity that you have worked with during better times offers you a defensive alliance in exchange for reasonable taxes and some loss of autonomy that might well seem like a better deal.

SWM wrote:They'll be scattered, of course. Which means no single system is going to be facing the entire SLN, just as I said. You're argument about facing the entire SLN is ridiculous.

And it's relatively easy to develop MDM system defense pods and something like Moriarity in a short amount of time. Which if you've got enough of, means you're pretty much safe from any conventional attack short of a big fleet of pod-laying wallers. Which very few polities have now or will for quite some time.

drothgery wrote:

SWM wrote:They'll be scattered, of course. Which means no single system is going to be facing the entire SLN, just as I said. You're argument about facing the entire SLN is ridiculous.

And it's relatively easy to develop MDM system defense pods and something like Moriarity in a short amount of time. Which if you've got enough of, means you're pretty much safe from any conventional attack short of a big fleet of pod-laying wallers. Which very few polities have now or will for quite some time.

Say what?

The typical Core World, not to mention the Shell or the Fringe, does not have the capacity to build their own space-going warships, let alone the infrastructure and research establishment to design next generation (for them) weapon systems.

There are maybe a couple of hundred systems, total, that build warships of any size and other space-going military systems. Everyone else buys them from systems that export military hardware.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if, for example, Technodyne manages to put together a system that's similar to Moriarty, using their existing conventional pods and Cataphract A pods, fairly rapidly. They may even have it in development. All-up MDMs? So far, they haven't managed to crack the idea of the "baffle." There may be another half dozen to a dozen systems that can do the same thing.

Every single-star polity that feels their neighbor breathing down their neck? No way.

Question: What are the size constraints on a missile designed to defend the system in which it is built and to be mounted in dedicated pods.

Answer: There are none.

Implication: You can take a collection of SDM's and bolt them together to produce a functioning multi-drive missile, as that has been stated and demonstrated to produce enough drive separation that the missiles will function fine.

Question: What core world has the ability to rapidly produce SDMs?

Answer: All of them, SDM missile drives have been considered a mature technology for several hundred years, with only slow and minor improvements. It's like asking what 1st world nations could produce diesel engines in a few months given a war mobilization.

Implication: Pretty much every core world can produce system defense MDMs.

Now how effective they will be depends on the warhead (and laser heads are well understood but not really mature), targeting and guidance. But given that SL tech is noted all the time as being significantly more advanced than Haven tech, it's pretty safe to say that the average core world can produce system defense MDM's that, when used in mass, will be an issue for smaller RMN/RHN units.

And as Manticore was producing something on the order of 100 missile pods a day (in order to arm the python lump), what makes you think that a core world can't produce at that rate?

kzt wrote:Question: What are the size constraints on a missile designed to defend the system in which it is built and to be mounted in dedicated pods.

Answer: There are none.

Implication: You can take a collection of SDM's and bolt them together to produce a functioning multi-drive missile, as that has been stated and demonstrated to produce enough drive separation that the missiles will function fine.

Counterexample: Darius (or Technodyne, if you want to take that threadbare coverup for who developed the tech), working at the problem with a huge amount of motivation, managed to come up with the Cataphract.

kzt wrote:Question: What core world has the ability to rapidly produce SDMs?

Answer: All of them, SDM missile drives have been considered a mature technology for several hundred years, with only slow and minor improvements. It's like asking what 1st world nations could produce diesel engines in a few months given a war mobilization.

Implication: Pretty much every core world can produce system defense MDMs.

Now how effective they will be depends on the warhead (and laser heads are well understood but not really mature), targeting and guidance. But given that SL tech is noted all the time as being significantly more advanced than Haven tech, it's pretty safe to say that the average core world can produce system defense MDM's that, when used in mass, will be an issue for smaller RMN/RHN units.

And as Manticore was producing something on the order of 100 missile pods a day (in order to arm the python lump), what makes you think that a core world can't produce at that rate?

Really? The fact that something is a "well-understood technology" in one place doesn't mean that some other place knows how it works, in the practical sense of being able to set up the manufacturing lines to create products using it. There's a huge amount of detail needed for each of the components, for example. Design documents never tell the whole story.

Manticore's high speed production technology has been called out specifically as being way in advance of anyone else's. That's canon. That's why I think other places can't do it in a practical sense.

The other reason is that the MAlign doesn't think most systems can build a credible (read: effective) self-defense force in time either. If they could, the entire Renaisance Factor strategy would be irrelevant. Why would a system that could protect itself be looking for a protector? The MAlign may be malign, but it's not stupid enough to make that kind of mistake.

The MA strategy hasn't caught up to the tech.

It was mentioned, by multiple people, that the Cataphract is a trivial innovation. It literally is two missiles bolted together, plus glue software. It could have been done hundreds of years ago but wasn't due to reasons. What is interesting is that you can fit it in ship missile tubes due to their using a CM, though one size larger tubes.

The same strategy works for full up missiles, though they won't fit in tubes and will require custom pods.

kzt wrote:Question: What are the size constraints on a missile designed to defend the system in which it is built and to be mounted in dedicated pods.

Answer: There are none.

Shadow of Saganami
Chapter Fifty-seven
(Battle of Monica) wrote:The missile pods provided by Technodyne ...

To reach their targets with enough time left on their drives for the necessary terminal attack maneuvers, the missiles would have to restrict themselves to half-power, "only" 43,000 gravities and a terminal velocity of "only" .32 c. They were big—larger even than a standard capital missile, more like something a ground-based system would have fired—and the designers had been able to squeeze only eight of them into each out-sized pod. But Hegedusic and Levakonic had deployed one hundred and twenty of those pods. Deployed them amid the concealing clutter of Eroica Station's platforms and in the protective radar shadows of handy asteroids.

I think there is a practical limit to the size of system defense missiles -- mostly imposed by the capacity of the tenders required to keep the pods serviced; the SDM Pods provided to Monica were limited to less than thirty days active deployment.

However, Technodyne has the ERSDM design, the pods to deploy and launch them, and the Cataphract multi-stage technology. It should be fairly trivial to combine those elements into truly humongous Multi-stage system defense missiles that don't have to be "ground" based. Even having to field a fleet of specialized ships to service each pod every thirty days or so would be possible, and Technodyne probably already has sales personnel/tech reps with every existing SDF because they are -- or at least were -- one of the primary arms suppliers in the Solarian League. (They could be as big as described on just SLN ship replacement orders; they have to have other customers.)

JohnRoth wrote:Counterexample: Darius (or Technodyne, if you want to take that threadbare coverup for who developed the tech), working at the problem with a huge amount of motivation, managed to come up with the Cataphract.

... and a network of Cataphract-C based system defense pods would in fact be Good Enough to hold off anything short of a fleet of pod-laying wallers.

drothgery wrote:

SWM wrote:They'll be scattered, of course. Which means no single system is going to be facing the entire SLN, just as I said. You're argument about facing the entire SLN is ridiculous.

And it's relatively easy to develop MDM system defense pods and something like Moriarity in a short amount of time. Which if you've got enough of, means you're pretty much safe from any conventional attack short of a big fleet of pod-laying wallers. Which very few polities have now or will for quite some time.

I'd suggest you look at Chapter 58 of Torch of Freedom, which says explicitly that the MAlign had been trying to do that for a significant length of time - and had not succeeded, which is why they developed the Cataphract. It's on page 533ff of the hardcover; the search term is "the Mesan Alignment had no reservations".