Reserve destruction

Weird Harold wrote:
The highlighted thought by Kolokoltsov is regarding the financial situation that would prevent them from reactivating anything even if they wanted to.

No one is saying the SLN is going to reactivate them either..... Since the SLN will not exist...

I predict the Reserve will survive long enought to complicate and delay any attempts to get new construction underway or to reform the League's government to allow it to wage war effectively.

Then, a significant number of the more modern hulls in the reserve will go missing, with the rest destroyed in an apparent attempt to cover up the threat. The investigation will initially lead to systems that might prove to be rivals to the Renaissance factor before ultimately assigning blame to Beowulf.

The missing SDs will then either show up in the hands of more expansionist successor states or just be used as a scapegoat for spider drive attacks on the RF's rivals. The latter is more likely since it spares MAlign the effort of actually re-activating the ships.

Here's a thought... maybe not a great one though.

Could minimally manned reserve SD's with Cataphracts be used to drive the RMN off most of the currently held wormholes briefly? Granted they'd be spit on a griddle on a per ship basis against anything Nike or larger, but the Mandarin's have to think it would screw with Manticore's plans having to defend against ships of the wall to keep Lacoon II in place. In the "bright idea" schemes department, that might briefly seem like a good idea to get the revenue flowing again.

[I'm not saying it would work, by the way...]

SharkHunter wrote:Here's a thought... maybe not a great one though.

Could minimally manned reserve SD's with Cataphracts be used to drive the RMN off most of the currently held wormholes briefly? Granted they'd be spit on a griddle on a per ship basis against anything Nike or larger, but the Mandarin's have to think it would screw with Manticore's plans having to defend against ships of the wall to keep Lacoon II in place. In the "bright idea" schemes department, that might briefly seem like a good idea to get the revenue flowing again.

[I'm not saying it would work, by the way...]

No, activation time is too long.

Attacks from hyper on the garrison of a WH is the obvious trick for the SLN to get some victories. You can, if your are not an idiot, get mass, surprise and firepower on your side. You will likely take losses unless you can get nearly energy range, but you can cancel the effect of their long range missiles.

kzt wrote:Attacks from hyper on the garrison of a WH is the obvious trick for the SLN to get some victories. You can, if your are not an idiot, get mass, surprise and firepower on your side. You will likely take losses unless you can get nearly energy range, but you can cancel the effect of their long range missiles.

The flip side is that the obvious counter is to keep at least most of the units covering a terminus moving unpredictably under minimum powered wedge - staying stealthy. You only need to stay within about 3 minutes powered flight time of the terminus to shred anybody coming through before they can get clear enough to switch to wedges and raise sidewalls. For Mk16 equipped units that can be up to about 11 million km away.

You jump in from hyper with overwhelming force, but can't localize targets. If they can slip beyond Cataphract range before your ships or recon drones find them they can launch Mk16s with impunity (though at the risk that there's been enough time you could hyper out if you started taking too much damage)

The SLN still ends up with temporary control of the terminus; but it's harder to kill a few RMN ships along the way.

Jonathan_S wrote:You jump in from hyper with overwhelming force, but can't localize targets. If they can slip beyond Cataphract range before your ships or recon drones find them they can launch Mk16s with impunity (though at the risk that there's been enough time you could hyper out if you started taking too much damage)

The SLN still ends up with temporary control of the terminus; but it's harder to kill a few RMN ships along the way.

Then they run into the larger force waiting in hyper. At 61:1 distance compression...

(Though I should point out that the space compression is not something David has acknowledged or said occurs. According to a couple of the B9 guys they agreed that space compression is totally logical and they can't see how hyper could logically work otherwise, this is apparently something that David has not been enthusiastic about and there is no text evidence that hyper works that way in the Honorverse.)

I've come to the conclusion that the reserve is simply DW's way to explain why the Solarian League doesn't bootstrap it's economy and start building effective counters to modern ships. Despite proof to the contrary, they don't think they need to. The MAN has enough people in place to cast doubt on the 'idiot' commanders that lost their Solly-tech ships to those 'neobarbs.' The people in position to make decisions are bought or bribed anyway, they just need to keep the popular revolt from happening until it will explode with maximum effect.

Seriously. The Sollies are the industrial equivalent of the US in World War 2. If they immediately decided to start creating a bunch of really potent light cruisers, they have PLENTY of old StateSec goons with practical experience wandering around that they could offer amnesty to in order to get consulting help. Not to mention the existing R&D teams that have been ignored. Or the intelligence reports that have been buried. Or the military observers that have been retired.

Systems similar to Moriarty would be fairly easy for the Solarian league to develop and control from dedicated cruiser-size ships. Their technology is NOT backwards. Their military applications are. That can change really quickly in the face of threat.

But the reserve... The reserve complicates things.

The idiot ball is being liberally handed to a lot of people, but there's a lot of bribery and personal threats behind the scenes too, making it hard to see where the real idiot balls are.

If they immediately decided to start creating a bunch of really potent light cruisers, they have PLENTY of old StateSec goons with practical experience wandering around that they could offer amnesty to in order to get consulting help.

Why would former State Sec Peeps be of any interest to the SLN's shipbuilders? Most were considered terribly incompetent by the regular Navy back when they were still operating together.

If they immediately decided to start creating a bunch of really potent light cruisers, they have PLENTY of old StateSec goons with practical experience wandering around that they could offer amnesty to in order to get consulting help.

Well... being rather generous, StateSec goons might be smart enough to mention "add more" and then shut up in regards to more what. StateSec was probably much like Chalice, and just about everyone else that wasn't already a leading star nation, in assuming "more weapons = more powerful warship". Except even StateSec warships were built to People's Navy specifications, before they were comandeered for StateSec purposes rather than "fighting the evil Manties".

StateSec goons are really exactly the same as OFS goons. They know how to break another persons head. Whether it's a prole, resistance/freedom fighter, terrorist, the label changes little, a head is a head and a pulse rifle butt is still gonna smash it.


I would say one could ask McKeon for first-hand experience, but sadly McKeon is no longer with us.

SharkHunter wrote:Here's a thought... maybe not a great one though.

Could minimally manned reserve SD's with Cataphracts be used to drive the RMN off most of the currently held wormholes briefly? Granted they'd be spit on a griddle on a per ship basis against anything Nike or larger, but the Mandarin's have to think it would screw with Manticore's plans having to defend against ships of the wall to keep Lacoon II in place. In the "bright idea" schemes department, that might briefly seem like a good idea to get the revenue flowing again.

[I'm not saying it would work, by the way...]

You have an interesting idea here.

- We know it won't work.
- Manticore knows it won't work.
- Any member of the solarian military with brains knows it won't work.

But

- The solly's have a proven history of doing politically correct stupid stuff


Never underestimate the ability of idiots to screw things up.