Operation Treehouse

The Star Empire can possibly build a secret shipyard now provided that they can figure out how to hide the funding but the Star Kingdom just didn't have the territory to work with for such a project, and by the time the Star Empire gained the territory needed they were in an active war.

Just where would Manticore find a place to set up Treehouse. At the time of the resumpton of the war with Haven, Manticore was still a one system entity. Basilisk is "just" a habitable planet at one terminus of the MJ network. They have an allied system- Grayson with a massive functional and growing shipbuilding capacity building ships that at fully compatable with the Manticorian built ships.

Their other allies in the Haven war are both known and, if have shipbuilding capacity, it is small. The orbital insustrial capacity other than Erwhon (who is about to leave because of High Ridge) the Aldermani (who are not yet really onboard) is minimal.

Manticore does not seem to be sending out ships doing exploration for even scientific research let alone colonization or expansion of the Kingdome. True, High Ridge's government is pumping money into looking for another worm hole associated with the existing Junction but that is highly driven as a way of diverting money from the Navy and puffing up the administration with something that MIGHT prove useful but is also providing graft for High Ridge's people.

Haven has an existing large number of planet/systems that have been aquired by conquest or intimidation over centuries. They are sperad over a massive area of space in the quadrant and Haven appears to have been activly pushing explorastion or at least long range patroling to see what was out there as potential new acquisitions. We really don't know how many systems they discovered and examined that came though their own exploration and had habitable planets that were not settled (or were/are settled but have so minor a population that they have not been any sort of market for Havenite goods nor produce anything (our usefull amounts of anything) vital to the wars). Bolthole is likely one of these places. Habitable planet (perhaps barely), too far from anything else they hold to have yet been seriously considered by the government for colonization and so far off any known trade route to be stumbled on by accident in regular trade.
Consider that ships that we have seen coming into Talbot Quadrant from other than Manticore (and as plots by the Alignment) are being portrayed as either on regular -if infrequent - trade runs or who appear to have picked up the locations of occupied planets from 3rd party sources and are investigating the possibility of workable trade with them. More or less prospecting amoung "frontier" communities to see if it worth their while to develope routes. Even the Ex Peep Destroyer and the Mars class ship seem to have come there to look for possible victims.

Manticore does NOT have a massive, unexplored or partially explored but not publicly documented area of space within the giant amoeba of PRH held territory bounded promarily of unexplored space where it has been going looking for new industrialized places to add to it's "republic".

Manticore has mostly been concentrating on it's local security, alliances with existing systems they know about and providing commerce protection for it's massive merchant marine. That is what is has been doing in Silesia. The other termini are primarily conduits/waypoints to markets connected by the MJ. Other than Basilisk- where Manticore has established a Trust for the benefit and proection of the Stilties, Manticore had Trade agreements and Treaties in place and apparently little if any actual possession of the systems at the other ends of the terminii other than soverenty over the actual wormhole.

Manticore has put all of its investment in industry and building miltary hardware at home because it really doesn't have any other place they can build it.

exiledtoIA wrote:Actually there is textev that Bolthole was started before the Committee took over Haven.
I can't remember the name of the Navies senior intel officer, but she comments that she would like to talk with ADM Parnell because she suspects he may have been involved with Bolthole from the start.

There's textev that Pat Givens thought Bolthole was set up by the Legislaturalists. But there's also Word of Weber that she was incorrect.

JPMorgan wrote:

Duckk wrote:
There's personally rich, and then there's socially rich. It's like asking Bill Gates to fund the US military. Even at his highest worth (and assuming he could liquidate everything at full value), Bill Gates was worth about 60 billion. That's still a full order of magnitude less than what the US spends on its military each year. There's no way any individual or handful of individuals can fund a project the size and complexity of Bolthole.

I am not saying they would pay for the ships. The yards themselves can be built by the private sector and they sell the ships to the government just like Grayson does. Many of their neighbors would be likely to help with manpower like Beowulf or even smaller ones like Zanzibar. Hell, Gustov would be more than helpful since he is getting serious tech transfer out of it. And there are thousands of close by star systems with no populations that they can hide in. Bolthole has no habitable planets or they would have been found by simply visiting all the stars with known habitable planets in their sphere of influence. Manticore did just that and failed. Dispatch ships went all over hell and back looking and came up empty handed.

Even if those people could fund just the shipyard infrastructure from their personal fortunes (which I tend to doubt) it'd basically be an all-in bet on a fairly short ceasefire.

Because while the ceasefire is in place they have basically no customers to buy any warships their yards produce. Grayson can already build all the ships it can afford (and probably then some) from it's domestic yards. Janesek is funding all the ships he cares to, so no purchases from Manticore. The minor members of the alliance don't have the ability to afford or man major combatants. And export controls on Manti/Grayson military tech would prevent sales to neutrals (which would include the Andies). So it's a race between the end of the ceasefire and the shipyard going broke (and taking all the invested fortunes with it).



Then there's a timing issue with the ships; since under this scenario there doesn't seem to be enough funds to build the first wave on spec (All the money went into building the infrastructure). So no orders (with pre-payments), no ships.
That means construction starts after the end of the ceasefire; so they're way behind the mostly complete ships at Grendlesbane, and fairly behind the semi-constructed ships in Manticore's home yards (the Python Lump).

In an alternate outcome where Grendlebane survived it's not clear that even Manticore could afford to simultaneously fund ships from a third major yard. So you're basically making a fortune-ruining financial bet that the ceasefire will be broken soon, that Manticore will lose significant shipbuilding capability, and yet anticipate a long enough war to be funding an additional post-python=lump wave of ships.



And here's the thing; it would still be a 'nice to have' rather than 'need to have' if Oyster Bay hadn't nuked the Manticoran and Grayson yards using a totally unforeseeable super-stealth tech. Because either Beatrice would have succeeded (and Manticore surrendered before the ships were ready) or as it happened Beatrice failed and the Python lump (once worked up) contained more than enough Apollo capable SD(P) to force Haven to surrender. So the Haven-Manticore war would have still have be over before these Treehouse ships would be operational.

Jonathan_S wrote: So the Haven-Manticore war would have still have be over before these Treehouse ships would be operational.

But there is still the Grand Alliance/Solarian League War to worry about. Even a guerre de course is going to need hulls, mostly light and medium, to engage in commerce raiding and commerce protection, system pickets. etc. And all of the termini to be swept up in Lacoon II. If it goes to a real shooting war, even if a division of Saganami Cs can take on a task force of SLN SDs, it's going to take even more hulls, up to BC, and even SDPs. And more LACs/CLACs/LAC Bases.

drothgery wrote:

Duckk wrote:That presumes that Manticore had the capability to make the massive monetary and industrial investment needed to build a secret shipyard disappear.

Also, it would be all but impossible for a free society to build a large-scale secret shipyard in peacetime (Haven was lucky the Committee set up Bolthole; the Republic probably couldn't have), and due to Honorverse construction and transportation times, if you start building a secret shipyard when you're actually at war, you probably won't get any capital ships out of it until the war's over.

It also presumes that you have the necessary large numbers of tech people AND that you can make them disappear for many many years. Not going to be that secret if they come back on regular rotation. Disappearing the people might be even harder than diverting the monies - almost impossible in an open society I would have thought!

There seems to be a lot of incorrect assumptions in some of these posts.

1. There are at least tens of thousands of stars missing from the map of populated stars. Probably hundreds of thousands since it is at a minimum 1,000 light years in diameter. DIAMETER!

2. For every populated star there are at least a dozen systems with no habitable planets within 20 light years of each and every populated planet. Every system has mineral riches somewhere inside it. Asteroid belts, planetary rings, comets, Oort clouds, etc., etc..

3. There are hundreds of undiscovered wormhole termini. Since termini are a few light seconds across in a volume that is several light months in diameter they are literally stumbled upon. Nobody searches for termini in uninhabitable systems. Only populated planets search there systems. The Lynx termini is an example. It would never have been found from the far end. The Hauptman cartel could afford to search clandestinely in nearby systems. It would be painstakingly slow and very expensive but the returns are astronomical. And no they wouldn't send their best out to search because the enemy would know they are missing.

3. Since hostilities started the production of merchant vessels has dried up drastically. Manticore supplied the vast majority of these ships hence their complete and total domination of shipping. Anybody building a shipyard can expect massive profits just from this. The little war between Haven & Manticore doesn't keep business from getting on with business in the rest of human space.

4. Bolthole was first and foremost an R&D facility. Yes they ended up building whole fleets of hundreds of wallers but that was not their initial purpose. After having their shipyards smashed they poured huge amounts of funds into it because they had NO CHOICE but to do so.

5. A shipyard built by Harrington & Hauptman would never be set up to build entire fleets. They would only supplement the Manticoran fleet with half a dozen or a dozen ships at a time. They would obviously start with smaller ships and work up to wallers over a decade or two. The point would have been to throw off Havenite projections of their building capacity. If 4 or 5 ships arrived at a time ever few months the enemy intelligence agencies would be hard pressed to determine for a certainty that a new shipyard existed.

6. It's fiction.

Fox2! wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote: So the Haven-Manticore war would have still have be over before these Treehouse ships would be operational.

But there is still the Grand Alliance/Solarian League War to worry about. Even a guerre de course is going to need hulls, mostly light and medium, to engage in commerce raiding and commerce protection, system pickets. etc. And all of the termini to be swept up in Lacoon II. If it goes to a real shooting war, even if a division of Saganami Cs can take on a task force of SLN SDs, it's going to take even more hulls, up to BC, and even SDPs. And more LACs/CLACs/LAC Bases.

Yes, in the exact sequence of events that happened these hypothetical Treehouse-build ships would prove quite useful.

But my point was that the situation Manticore and Grayson find themselves in is so improbable that it would have been verging o insanity to gamble several people's entire fortunes to hedge against it. (Fortunes that would have been most likely ben lost had almost any other outcome occurred). Back near the start of the ceasefire (when Janesek suspended the bulk of the RMN construction) is the earliest this plan could be put into place - but at that point there was no suspicion of a confrontation with the League.

I'm of the opinion that this is looking too much in hindsight at what actually happened; and not looking forward from the points in time where this might have been contemplated as what looked to be the likely outcomes.

Jonathan_S wrote:But my point was that the situation Manticore and Grayson find themselves in is so improbable that it would have been verging o insanity to gamble several people's entire fortunes to hedge against it. (Fortunes that would have been most likely ben lost had almost any other outcome occurred).

WOW! Really? Shipyards spend 99% of their time making merchant vessels. Only during wartime do they convert to making mostly military vessels. During peace time they do make warships but usually just enough to replace mothballed vessels. Manticore started cornering the merchant fleet way back when the first termini was discovered. Hell they didn't even suspect the termini was there before the idea to build their own ships was bandied about. They were building ships for hauling freight so they wouldn't payout billions to other star systems. It paid off in a big way.

Manticore had spent more than 50 years before the outbreak of the war with PRH building up it's military R&D plus expanding it's navy to include the products of that R&D and aquire the types of ships it anticipated needing to face PRH.

Haven had been also expanding their fleets but with lower, more traditional tech level and it was pushing that growth into three general areas that differed from the choices made by Manticore. Haven was continuing to build to provide front line ships to fight and intimidate the systems it was taking into the "Republic" by conquest. It also needed to keep expanding the numbers of ships used for general defence and patrol of the growing volume of space. The third piece of the growth was things like the classes of Battleships which were apparently designed and deployed to suppress and overawe subject populations and keep a lid on possible rebellions. Then there were things like the Sirius, which were purpose-built Q-ships rather than merchant hull conversions.

Haven was not just taking over systems with minimal or basic industries and managing to survive. They were taking reasonalby well developed planets which, if they could not build their own warships, had small but competent navies or SDFs by either what appear to be OFS/Transstellar methods or outright warfare. We saw this described in the series and in detail with the makeup of the prisoners on Cerberus. Dozens of them.

Manticor, beyond its naval development and buildup, was very focused on also building commerce protection units. It was also building merchant shipping. It had been building merchants before it was building warships and that merchant fleet was a major source of it's economy. That building of merchants, while encouraged by the government, was all private development. Haven would appear to have had relativly few merchant ships and certainly by the time it was getting ready to tackle Manticore, most of them were probably controlled if not outright owned by the PRH government. One of the things mentioned in the series was that, in the long prelude to getting to the attack on Manticore, PRH closed its trade to Manticore flagged shipping. That was multi-fold, diverting the income from trade movement to PRH and damaging the trade and economy of Manticore.

Manticore grew 1st by taking advantage of sucessfull merchant traffic and then by the discovery of what became the Manticore Junction. Remember that you have to make a profit if you are going to survive in merchant trade. There is also the often mentioned fact that merchant shipping doesn't have to be new ships. We see merchant vessels that are 80, 100, 150 years old and the general tech levels have not shifted that much. Sure, there will have been repairs and modifications/upgrades of these ships, but no where near the levels that even Solly warships have undergone. Freighters just keep moving at relatively sedate speeds and hauling goods and people around. Except for piracy and the occasional accident, the numbers of hulls has kept growing. It is partially the quality but Manticore (less so than the more recent developments in economics of Grayson's capacity) seems to have been able to build merchant shipping both more economically and domesticly (plus crew them with Manticorian people) than yards in much of the League. We have been told that at least one of the major shipping cartels in the League leases much of its capacity from Manticore based companies and those ships are crewed by Manticorian citizens with (usually) only a cartel representivie onboard as the agent.

Home-built military would have been an outgrowth of that civilian shipyard growth. From discussions shown in the Long series, it was clear that the government saw that getting into building it's own warships both made them less dependent on outside sources and kept the money in the Kingdom. It would also have provided them with another export in time.

Haven and Manticore both wanted to keep the military tech development and production numbers secret. Haven had set up Bolthole and used ability and opportunity of a much larger area of control plus tighter control of population as well as military someplace way off the traveled spaces and Manticore chose Sphinx as a place to put Weyland Station which could be sequestered and restricted from foreign traffic as a military area. The traffic into the Manticore Binary system appears to be into Manticore A only and I would expect that anything going to Manticore B is going to be trans-shipped though either Manticore A or directly from the Junction to Manticore B on Manticorian ships. They don't have to be obvious military transports, you use civilian contractors or you set up various companies dedicated to servicing the military destined shipments.

Manticore has been operating on the basis that it's military production is best protected by keeping it under the defence of the Home Fleet and local extra patrolling than trying to hide it somewhere outside the -at the time- Home System and only one for the Kingdom and putting a separate fleet there.