(SPOILERS) Expected defeat at Beowulf.

Weird Harold wrote:Mycroft is (will be) a defense system similar to Haven's Moriarty system with FTL missile control and Mk25(?) Apollo four-drive system defense missiles. The first installation in textev is the one going into Beowulf's defense.

Somtaaw wrote:Case of fire already passed, Manticore's making a point of stepping away from Beowulf to give the illusion they're not forcing the vote.

Having forces stealthed, that drop their stealth to do anything less than outright destroy an incoming Solarian fleet, and a 100% destruction with zero survivors at that, becomes a propaganda master's wet dream.

With that sort of 'evidence' of Manty 'foul-play', the Solarian League instantly gets plenty of propaganda showing how Manticore uses violence, and threat of same, to manipulate others. And that the Solarian League is only doing the proper and humane thing by fighting them, and so on and so forth. And all the League had to do, was send a large task force they were already going to send. If it worked and they took over Beowulf, they can spin the vote to show Beowulf didn't really want to secede from the League (Manty force!), they lose a whole fleet (Manty aggression!), or they discover stealthed units that threatened them off (Manty aggression and arrogance!)

No matter how Manticore tries to play it, if they engage openly in any format.... they lose in propaganda wars. Even though those-in-the-know already lean towards Manticore, and those in the Shell or Verge do as well, all the Core Worlds believe the propaganda from the Mandarins. That's why both the Beowulfan and Manticoran embassies were getting mobbed and such... people (and a large majority at that) believe the lies.



in the unfortunate case of a minefield, nothing that was openly Manticoran, or even a Manticoran Auxiliary, engaged at all. There's very little that can be spun there, you could argue that since mines are little more than missile warheads with no impeller drives it's obviously Manty weaponry... but Manticore's already shown the Mandarins they don't need to be deceptive to wreck whole fleets. Filareta, Crandall, and Byng all being dead from Manticoran units firing openly, and records of such being provided openly to the Mandarins.

Silverwall wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Snippage

Again I don't understand why Beowulf would care about the PR aspect when simultaneously we have Mike Henke occupying a frontier capital and Mesa by direct conquest. If your ally is going for direct conquest on sector capitals and independent worlds why is anyone worrying about a vote being seen as illegitimate? If I am the typical Sollie I am either brainwashed already and take Mike's actions as proof of the evil Manty empire or if I have a functional brain I figure that Beowulf is really voting independently. Lets be honest the proximity to the wormhole means that the mandarins can spin coercion regardless so lets make sure we protect our eggs and say damn the PR aspect and put a good defensive fleet in orbit.

Fox2! wrote:We don't know (yet) whose starships jumped into the Mesa system at the end of Cauldron of Ghosts. Is it Mike? Or Chien Liu? Or even the Protector's Own? (Less likely). It's not the MSN, nor even the RF fleet, or the MPF wouldn't be offering a cease-fire in place with discussion of plans to withdraw. The Detweilers have abandoned Mesa like so much garbage.

It may even be Galactica and the Colonial Fleet.

Until we find out who the new player in town is, all that we know is that they are not friendly to the corporate powers that be.

Xuan-Wu wrote:What's everyone opinion for the next solarian attack on Beowulf ?

The time line tell us that drone defense system would be operationnal in one to two months.

As the Solarian are not really battle-ready. Their response time to launch this operation (as the operationnal plan was just put in place), plus transit time, I don't see them being capable to succee in this.

Would Mesa involve themself ? For what purpose ?

Would a successfull defense of Beowulf be seen as an attack on solarian suppremacy ? (I think yes)

Would that put more pressure from the solarian on Beowulf ?

kzt wrote:Wouldn't you feel all warm and comfy knowing that an untested automated system controlling tens of tens of thousands of frac-C missiles is being deployed around your home system? What could possibly go wrong?

Weird Harold wrote:

kzt wrote:Wouldn't you feel all warm and comfy knowing that an untested automated system controlling tens of tens of thousands of frac-C missiles is being deployed around your home system? What could possibly go wrong?

Where did you get the impression that Mycroft was an automated system?

Silverwall wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:Case of fire already passed, Manticore's making a point of stepping away from Beowulf to give the illusion they're not forcing the vote.

Having forces stealthed, that drop their stealth to do anything less than outright destroy an incoming Solarian fleet, and a 100% destruction with zero survivors at that, becomes a propaganda master's wet dream.

With that sort of 'evidence' of Manty 'foul-play', the Solarian League instantly gets plenty of propaganda showing how Manticore uses violence, and threat of same, to manipulate others. And that the Solarian League is only doing the proper and humane thing by fighting them, and so on and so forth. And all the League had to do, was send a large task force they were already going to send. If it worked and they took over Beowulf, they can spin the vote to show Beowulf didn't really want to secede from the League (Manty force!), they lose a whole fleet (Manty aggression!), or they discover stealthed units that threatened them off (Manty aggression and arrogance!)

No matter how Manticore tries to play it, if they engage openly in any format.... they lose in propaganda wars. Even though those-in-the-know already lean towards Manticore, and those in the Shell or Verge do as well, all the Core Worlds believe the propaganda from the Mandarins. That's why both the Beowulfan and Manticoran embassies were getting mobbed and such... people (and a large majority at that) believe the lies.



in the unfortunate case of a minefield, nothing that was openly Manticoran, or even a Manticoran Auxiliary, engaged at all. There's very little that can be spun there, you could argue that since mines are little more than missile warheads with no impeller drives it's obviously Manty weaponry... but Manticore's already shown the Mandarins they don't need to be deceptive to wreck whole fleets. Filareta, Crandall, and Byng all being dead from Manticoran units firing openly, and records of such being provided openly to the Mandarins.

Again I don't understand why Beowulf would care about the PR aspect when simultaneously we have Mike Henke occupying a frontier capital and Mesa by direct conquest. If your ally is going for direct conquest on sector capitals and independent worlds why is anyone worrying about a vote being seen as illegitimate? If I am the typical Sollie I am either brainwashed already and take Mike's actions as proof of the evil Manty empire or if I have a functional brain I figure that Beowulf is really voting independently. Lets be honest the proximity to the wormhole means that the mandarins can spin coercion regardless so lets make sure we protect our eggs and say damn the PR aspect and put a good defensive fleet in orbit.

kzt wrote:They are not deploying huge ships with hundreds of thousands of ton of computers and hundreds of tactical analysts, which is what you use on a SD that controls a bunch of Apollo missiles via a pair of KH2s. The are deploying just a distributed network of KH2s with minor enough modifications that they are not putting it through acceptance tests. What the crew on a KH2?

A Rising Thunder
Chapter Thirty-three
wrote: One of the problems the Alliance was bound to face if the situation continued to deteriorate was the need to free up capital ships for mobile operations rather than tying them down in static defenses. Honor, as the unwilling beta tester for Shannon Foraker’s Moriarity system, had developed a profound respect for the effectiveness of massed MDM pods in the system-defense role. Michelle Henke’s success at Spindle had reconfirmed that respect even before Filareta’s spectacular demise. Which was why Honor had devoted quite a bit of thought to ways in which Moriarity’s system-wide network of dispersed sensor and fire-control stations could be updated to take advantage of the Mark 23 and the Mark 23-E. The answer Hemphill had come up with was Mycroft, named for a character out of the same pre-space detective fiction which had given Foraker Moriarity in the first place.

Essentially, Mycroft was simply a couple of dozen Keyhole-Two platforms parked at various points in a star system. It was a little more complicated than that, since the platforms were designed to operate on beamed power from their motherships, so it was necessary to provide each platform with its own power plant. And it was also necessary to provide the raw fire control and the rest of the supporting hardware and software which was normally parked aboard the platform’s deploying ship-of-the-wall. Those were relatively straightforward problems in engineering, however, especially with an entire planet to work with, and tech crews were working at breakneck pace even as Honor stood with her uncle and her spouses to meet them.

Mycroft’s advantages over Moriarity would be profound. Unlimited by Moriarity’s lightspeed control links, Mycroft would be able to take full advantage of the Mark 23-E and the FTL reconnaissance platforms which were also being thickly seeded throughout the system’s volume. And unlike Moriarity—which had been unarmed and defenseless when Honor used Hemphill’s Baldur to take it out—Keyhole-Two platforms were simply crammed with active antimissile defenses. No doubt they could be taken out, but it would be a difficult task, and enough of them were being deployed as part of Mycroft to ensure survivability through sheer redundancy.