(SPOILERS) Expected defeat at Beowulf.

Nowhere does it say Mycroft would be autonomous or automatic. It is based on Haven's Moriarty, which feature three identical command centers (of roughly BC size) and it seems probable that Mycroft will have the same sort of command and control centralization.

Uhh, what? Moriarty is a single platform of heavy cruiser size.

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.

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.

****** *


Case of fire has NOT passed. 'Case of fire' is when missiles have flown and 10M lay dead!

The GA isn't giving the illusion of anything. Nor should she. Beowulf will vote as they please. In fact, politically, the GA shouldn't give the illusion of anything, but continue to place its cards on the table in a straightforward manner as it has always done regarding the League. No need to adopt 'smoke and mirrors' tactics 'politically', unless they've got something to hide, because later that something can backfire. The GA just needs to keep its nose clean - politically. Barring incompetent military preparation to protect millions of lives.

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.

Now's your chance to enter into exhibit something that's 'already past.' The Sollies have long been given enough political smut to cause that effect. They've already had their wet PR dreams and have already enjoyed multiple orgasms -- Byng thinking that the RMN destroyed a civilian space station. Crandall? being denied passage through Beowulf junction. Beowulf wanting to secede after being assisted by a Manty fleet. Filareta being taken to task. I'm afraid that ship's done sailed a round trip!

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.

Indeed! No matter how the good kid plays it, the bully is going to conveniently assume what he may. So the proper thing to do is to look out for himself and discharge his responsibilites. Dammit, they've been using Honor's phrase forever, now is another time to heed its meaning, BE ABOUT IT!

You ever seen the movie "Tank" with James Garner? Basic synopsis... James Garner owns his own Sherman Tank. He uses it to break out his framed son and rescue him from a red neck cracker of a sheriff. The plan is to drive that tank across the state line to the real authorities. "But a Sherman tank is not a fuel frugal Toyota, I'm telling you. It ain't a long ways to empty on a Sherman tank," says the redneck sheriff who places guards at every gas station in that small town. However, a private individual supplied Garner with gas and food somewhere in the back country. A scorned sheriff implies -- during a live tv interview -- that the lone wolf citizen was going to receive a bit of negative feedback later that night. Well, James Garner returned the favor and brought his tank to that house burning party and scattered the lynching posse because he overheard the tv interview and accepted his moral responsibility. But I digress...

Beowulf is supplying gas to the Harrington plan. And psychologically, their longtime relationship with Manticore has encouraged them and given them the moral and military support to finally leave their abusive husband. But now, the GA cannot fail in realizing its responsibility in laying down covering fire for the secession. To fail in that goal will not only fire a broadside into the Harrington plan but will place a black mark on what the RMN has always stood for. That should be the GA's main concern -- the many lives that they know from a shadow of a doubt from the last encounter at Beowulf that are in jeopardy and protecting the Harrington plan from burning, in the eyes of all those member states wanting to follow. The weight of the entire Harrington plan is on the shoulders of what happens at Beowulf. The GA, led by the moral high ground of the RMN, must not deviate from their MO and remove their eye from the ball. As you've said, everyone who counts, already knows the truth and can sort the chaff from the wheat and will also be able to do the same sorting after Beowulf -- come what may, as long as the GA doesn't try to deviate from who they are.

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.

I don't disagree with your use of mines or its implication that the GA must do something. I question the fact that you seem to rely on it being adequate protection. If the current mutated strain of the Ebola virus that seems to be affecting US citizens and causing them to walk into filled rooms and start loosing ordnance suddenly infects the League and they hyper in-systen and begin to do the same, mines ain't gonna be an effective deterrent. In fact, it may be miscontrued even worse than the Giselle incident, to be an attack from Beowulf. And we all know what happens when the SLN improperly assesses an 'incident." This is the end game for Beowulf and many lives are at stake. For Beowulf and the GA to not implement 'proper' contingency plans to protect an entire planet (and especially after becoming privy to Frontier Fleet's infamous 'Contingency Plans') is an all encompassing, mixed bag of NUTS and morally irresponsible! It would supercede in history any tactical blunder that Santino or Janacek ever did. Well, perhaps not Janacek's, but it'd at least equal him. And if 10M die w/o a proper tactical contingent emplaced with obsessive regard to 'lives' in lieu of 'appearance,' then after this Germaine hollowcause, then just as Janacek, someone should take a self inflicted bullet to the head.

And if this 'don't shoot until they shoot' policy is implemented 'in this case' to mirror the atrocious expense of lives to fuel their goals in martyr-ess fashion, as was the MO of that guiltless MAlign double copper-plated super bitch who orchestrated the Giselle incident, then the blood of 10M lives are on the hands of Beowulf and I cannot see the GA being an accomplice to that.

MOREOVER, if any history books that are born in the aftermath records that "the 10M lives that were lost was kept below 100M because the GA was in position, and owed to the staple of Manty talent (that has kept them alive against Haven) of properly reading and preparing for aggression," is far more acceptable to "10M lost because of GA incompetence."


All of this falls under my 'tinfoil hat' of an opinion.

cthia wrote:Is there any reason why the GA can't strategically position forces half the distance to the goal -- in stealth, as Fearless was when Honor pock shotted D'Orville in the fleet games?

This has gotten so far off base that we need to take a really close look at some of the options.

1. Grav waves travel at 62 times light speed in normal space. The time from when the ISLN fleet drops out of hyper to when they would be detected at the wormhole terminus is 4 minutes. Positioning a fleet halfway between the two cuts this time to 2 minutes.

2. You can't keep a crew at general quarters indefinitely. They have no idea when the Sollies are going to attack, so there is a minimum response time to get into hyper and get moving. That won't change whether or not the GA fleet is at the terminus or in normal space halfway between.

3. Once the fleet gets into hyper it's got to get there. The farther it has to travel, the faster it's going to be going at the midpoint, so positioning the fleet at the midpoint is not going to cut the flight time in half. It'll reduce it by maybe a third, if that.

Therefore, positioning the fleet halfway there would cut the response time by maybe 15 minutes. So. 45 minutes instead of my original SWAG guess of an hour.

4. That, of course, applies if the fleet is in normal space. If so, there's absolutely no point in a dispatch boat: the fleet will detect the emergence into normal space a lot faster than the dispatch boat can even react.

5. If the fleet is in hyper, then they'll need a dispatch boat, always assuming that they don't simply see the ISLN fleet approaching. That cuts the response time significantly.

6. The real clanger. What is going to stop Beowulf from seeding the system with those shoals of missiles and controlling them from their perfectly competent SDs? The whole reason for Mycroft is to free up SDs so they aren't tied down having to handle system defense fire control. In this case, using the Beowuld SDF for fire control until Mycroft comes up is most likely the optimal strategy.

Duckk wrote:

Nowhere does it say Mycroft would be autonomous or automatic. It is based on Haven's Moriarty, which feature three identical command centers (of roughly BC size) and it seems probable that Mycroft will have the same sort of command and control centralization.

Uhh, what? Moriarty is a single platform of heavy cruiser size.

I think WH is referring to the minor fact that Moriarty was deployed in 3 individual units (with their own crews) in Lovat.

At All Costs, chapter 56 and 57 wrote:Just over eight thousand LACs were based on Forge and the system's orbital platforms. A permanent covering force of three battle squadrons—admittedly, of pre-pod types, but still a total of twenty-four superdreadnoughts—was assigned, and the system was liberally blanketed with system defense missile pods. In the last six months, Lovat had also received not just one Moriarty platform, but three, the second pair to serve solely as backups for the first.

-snip-

"I know that, Ma'am. And so do our LAC crews. But that doesn't keep it from being irritating, and Commander Lucas reports that Moriarty's gold crew is beginning to suffer from fatigue." "I told the Octagon we needed more personnel," Giovanni growled. "Unfortunately, we don't really have them yet—not for Moriarty. Or, rather, we could have complete backup crews . . . if we were willing to do without backup platforms ."

-snip-

"Shall I instruct Lucas to stand the gold platform down and bring up silver or bronze?"
"Um." Giovanni ran a hand over her dark hair, eyes thoughtful, then shrugged. "Go ahead and shift to silver. I doubt we're really going to need them, but it won't hurt for silver to get a little more hands-on experience, anyway."

Each Moriarty platform is as you said, the size of a battlecruiser, with damned near 100% of it's tonnage devoted to fire control and sensors. However, it's original design was also to be as an add-on, or inside what amounted to a superdreadnought hull for protection. Theisman overrode Foraker on that, so instead they deployed additional Moriarty units to compensate for their weakness.


So when they change over from Moriarty to Mycroft, the only thing that's truly going to change is the Moriarty control platforms (complete with real, live people and not AI) will be grav-pulse FTL transmitters allowing Apollo control.

JohnRoth wrote:

cthia wrote:Is there any reason why the GA can't strategically position forces half the distance to the goal -- in stealth, as Fearless was when Honor pock shotted D'Orville in the fleet games?

This has gotten so far off base that we need to take a really close look at some of the options.

1. Grav waves travel at 62 times light speed in normal space. The time from when the ISLN fleet drops out of hyper to when they would be detected at the wormhole terminus is 4 minutes. Positioning a fleet halfway between the two cuts this time to 2 minutes.

2. You can't keep a crew at general quarters indefinitely. They have no idea when the Sollies are going to attack, so there is a minimum response time to get into hyper and get moving. That won't change whether or not the GA fleet is at the terminus or in normal space halfway between.

3. Once the fleet gets into hyper it's got to get there. The farther it has to travel, the faster it's going to be going at the midpoint, so positioning the fleet at the midpoint is not going to cut the flight time in half. It'll reduce it by maybe a third, if that.

Therefore, positioning the fleet halfway there would cut the response time by maybe 15 minutes. So. 45 minutes instead of my original SWAG guess of an hour.

4. That, of course, applies if the fleet is in normal space. If so, there's absolutely no point in a dispatch boat: the fleet will detect the emergence into normal space a lot faster than the dispatch boat can even react.

5. If the fleet is in hyper, then they'll need a dispatch boat, always assuming that they don't simply see the ISLN fleet approaching. That cuts the response time significantly.

6. The real clanger. What is going to stop Beowulf from seeding the system with those shoals of missiles and controlling them from their perfectly competent SDs? The whole reason for Mycroft is to free up SDs so they aren't tied down having to handle system defense fire control. In this case, using the Beowuld SDF for fire control until Mycroft comes up is most likely the optimal strategy.

Now that, is an acceptable reason why my tactic isn't practical. Is it possible to choose a strategic point closer in-system that will work, while stealthed yet will still remain outside of effective SLN missile range?

At any rate, the gist of my post still stands. The RMN must respect Beowulf's wishes, yes, but must do it in a fashion that 'lives' and not 'appearance' is the main objective. GA reputation is also on the line, and if 10M die due to Beowulf's incompetence then the GA are guilty by association. Good luck peddling the Harrington plan then -- or sleeping peacefully at night in the aftermath.

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2506&p=50175

See specifically points 2 and 3:

runsforcelery wrote:First, Beowulf is not simply announcing its withdrawal from the League. There's this little thing called a vote.

Second, the SEM has a legal right, under its existing treaties with Beowulf, to defend the wormhole nexus which is outside Beowulf territorial space. The SEM does not have a legal right to maintain armed forces in Solarian sovereign space. In that regard, Beowulf is already in a “gray area” because of the stance it’s taken based on its local autonomy under the Constitution. By stationing Manticoran units inside Beowulf territorial space while that space is still legally part of the League, they take things to a whole new level. Once the vote is in and Beowulf has seceded from the League, those constraints change; at the moment, they are still in effect and violation of them is likely to affect how the rest of the League (that is, other systems who have to decide whether to emulate Beowulf or remain “loyal” to the Mandarins) regard both Beowulf and Manticore.

Third, having 200 Manticoran wallers (the number someone suggested should be put in orbit around Beowulf to warn the Sollies off) in the system’s vicinity (i.e., covering the wormhole) at all should be enough to convince any semi-sane opponent as outclassed as the Sollies to stay the hell away from it. That is, especially with the range of Manty missiles and the ability to micro jump around the perimeter of the hyper limit and engage from far outside it, a Manty fleet covering the junction can get into engagement range of a Solly fleet crossing the hyper limit inbound well before that Solly fleet could reach its own powered engagement range of the planet. That is, a Manty fleet covering the wormhole is covering the planet, but doing it without violating Beowulfan/Solly territoriality.

Fourth (and in conjunction with reason 2, above), with the referendum/plebiscite to be held, stationing a heavy force in close to the planet truly could have the effect of intimidating voters into siding with Manticore, which would be anathema to both the Beowulfan Directors and to Manticore. Whether it did or not, the appearance of coercion would be there, and would be grist for the Solly propaganda mill. The SEM wants to break the power of the Mandarins to control Solly policy, and they want the League itself to fragment so they can reach negotiated settlements with the reasonable bits and pieces and deprive the unreasonable bits and pieces of the resources of the rest of the League. From a political perspective, it is essential that the vote on Beowulf be seen as free of coercion and intimidation and that the Mandarins be deprived of as many opportunities to present it otherwise as possible.

In short, I don’t think what the Manties did was stupid or irrational. In most respects, they can have their cake and eat it, too, where Beowulf’s real security is concerned; they do it in a way which deprives the Mandarins of a ready made propaganda tool; they do not intimidate the voters they want to be their allies (and those voters know they weren’t intimidated); and they leave any overt aggressive act in the system to the Mandarins, which becomes a positive propaganda tool from their side and a negative one from the Mandarins’ perspective. If the Sollies are stupid enough to attack Beowulf, they can only succeed if they manage to get into the orbitals, secure the surrender of the planet, and install a puppet government which will repudiate the referendum on secession. What do you think the odds of their pulling that off are likely to be? And in terms of coldblooded real politik, having the Sollies try to crush Beowulf — and fail — would be very useful to the Manties and their allies in their confrontation with the Mandarins and in terms of accelerating the disintegration of the League.

too long a post to quote Cthia, so I'll just respond with a small statement.


You're quite correct, Manticore and Beowulf are close, and the Alliance has the imperative to protect their 'gas station' friend. But since we already know that somehow, someway.... Beowulf is about to get waxed, and that Manticore made the incredibly stupid decision to say "hey we're going to sit at the Junction and be totally out of this"



I'm looking for ways that they could be 'defending', without doing the smart thing, and just parking an all-up battle fleet or even just a major task force deep in system... without more than casual stealth.



Without doing the smart thing, I'm really looking at methods of defense, that are not, and cannot be as good as a task force (or larger), or a Mycroft/Moriarty defense. Minefield's are good, and we've also seen that even with some warning, Admiral Chin in Hancock took some pounding, but it wasn't decisive damage. She lost one dreadnought, but it had already been rather heavily pounded even before it'd reached the mines. And she lost another one to sustained fire from the battlecruisers, that had also taken a minor beating from the mines.


Another bad defense, would be Manticore not dropping off enough flatpack pods, for Beowulfan-only ships to tow out against an incoming fleet.... which may be carrying more than the typical loadout of canister missiles. Since canister after all, is just a way to punch out more counter-missiles, and if the salvo density isn't high, enough even badly guided/unguided CMs could bring the lethality down. There will be losses, but not enough to stop the attack we (as readers and forumites) know is not only going to happen, but be a successful attack.


And like you've said, the Alliance isn't doing the smart choice and saying "damn the PR, full fleet guard!"

Duckk wrote:http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=2506&p=50175

See specifically points 2 and 3:

runsforcelery wrote:First, Beowulf is not simply announcing its withdrawal from the League. There's this little thing called a vote.

Second, the SEM has a legal right, under its existing treaties with Beowulf, to defend the wormhole nexus which is outside Beowulf territorial space. The SEM does not have a legal right to maintain armed forces in Solarian sovereign space. In that regard, Beowulf is already in a “gray area” because of the stance it’s taken based on its local autonomy under the Constitution. By stationing Manticoran units inside Beowulf territorial space while that space is still legally part of the League, they take things to a whole new level. Once the vote is in and Beowulf has seceded from the League, those constraints change; at the moment, they are still in effect and violation of them is likely to affect how the rest of the League (that is, other systems who have to decide whether to emulate Beowulf or remain “loyal” to the Mandarins) regard both Beowulf and Manticore.

Third, having 200 Manticoran wallers (the number someone suggested should be put in orbit around Beowulf to warn the Sollies off) in the system’s vicinity (i.e., covering the wormhole) at all should be enough to convince any semi-sane opponent as outclassed as the Sollies to stay the hell away from it. That is, especially with the range of Manty missiles and the ability to micro jump around the perimeter of the hyper limit and engage from far outside it, a Manty fleet covering the junction can get into engagement range of a Solly fleet crossing the hyper limit inbound well before that Solly fleet could reach its own powered engagement range of the planet. That is, a Manty fleet covering the wormhole is covering the planet, but doing it without violating Beowulfan/Solly territoriality.

Fourth (and in conjunction with reason 2, above), with the referendum/plebiscite to be held, stationing a heavy force in close to the planet truly could have the effect of intimidating voters into siding with Manticore, which would be anathema to both the Beowulfan Directors and to Manticore. Whether it did or not, the appearance of coercion would be there, and would be grist for the Solly propaganda mill. The SEM wants to break the power of the Mandarins to control Solly policy, and they want the League itself to fragment so they can reach negotiated settlements with the reasonable bits and pieces and deprive the unreasonable bits and pieces of the resources of the rest of the League. From a political perspective, it is essential that the vote on Beowulf be seen as free of coercion and intimidation and that the Mandarins be deprived of as many opportunities to present it otherwise as possible.

In short, I don’t think what the Manties did was stupid or irrational. In most respects, they can have their cake and eat it, too, where Beowulf’s real security is concerned; they do it in a way which deprives the Mandarins of a ready made propaganda tool; they do not intimidate the voters they want to be their allies (and those voters know they weren’t intimidated); and they leave any overt aggressive act in the system to the Mandarins, which becomes a positive propaganda tool from their side and a negative one from the Mandarins’ perspective. If the Sollies are stupid enough to attack Beowulf, they can only succeed if they manage to get into the orbitals, secure the surrender of the planet, and install a puppet government which will repudiate the referendum on secession. What do you think the odds of their pulling that off are likely to be? And in terms of coldblooded real politik, having the Sollies try to crush Beowulf — and fail — would be very useful to the Manties and their allies in their confrontation with the Mandarins and in terms of accelerating the disintegration of the League.

Quenches my thirst. Thanks Duckk.

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

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?

The KH2's are the relays. I assume Mycroff still had manned forts with tactical departments that make final determinations about when and where to fire the system defense pods. Mycroft's cloud of KH2 derivatives would just let them control them across the entire inner system with less lag than an end of run SDM would have had.


We've never seen system defense pods allowed to engage autonomously[1], and deciding to do so as part of installing vastly lower fire-control lag to them would be a very nonsensical place to start. I'm quite confident there's a man in the loop on the Mycroft system defense network - but back at some orbital fort.

That's not so say it the new network might not have teething problems or even failures; but it's likely to fail to launch (loss of power, loss of comms, etc) rather than fail by autonomously attacking the wrong target.
-----------------
[1] Mines, yes. But usually those are either emplaced temporarily or else are covering specific small high-risk areas

Weird Harold wrote:The description of Mycroft in textev:

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.

Nowhere does it say Mycroft would be autonomous or automatic. It is based on Haven's Moriarty, which feature three identical command centers (of roughly BC size) and it seems probable that Mycroft will have the same sort of command and control centralization.

Sure. Where is the command and control node you say it has? The description expressly points out that it has no such command and control nodes. It's a cloud of KH2s, which are unmanned automated fire control platforms, each heavily defended by their own automated point defense systems.

Not that I'm saying its Skynet, but it's Skynet.