(SPOILERS) Expected defeat at Beowulf.

What is the likelihood of the Mandarans expediting the refit of the 2,000 or so wallers currently being done and throwing a couple thousand of the wall at Beowulf...or anywhere else against the alliance for that matter?
At 2nd Manticore, ADM Filareta said (and I paraphrase) "alright, hail the Manties, see if they're done changing their breeches after 400 of the wall warping in." Said Manties didn't bat and eye and we know how that ended. What if the SLN decides to try a modern Farley's Crossing and and drop 3-5x what Filareta had just to try to get a reaction from the GA and Beowulf? To drive home the point, they don't even try to talk first and just dive straight into the system and try to plow through anything there like the Zhukov's Red Army?

ChronicRder wrote:What is the likelihood of the Mandarans expediting the refit of the 2,000 or so wallers currently being done and throwing a couple thousand of the wall at Beowulf...or anywhere else against the alliance for that matter?
At 2nd Manticore, ADM Filareta said (and I paraphrase) "alright, hail the Manties, see if they're done changing their breeches after 400 of the wall warping in." Said Manties didn't bat and eye and we know how that ended. What if the SLN decides to try a modern Farley's Crossing and and drop 3-5x what Filareta had just to try to get a reaction from the GA and Beowulf? To drive home the point, they don't even try to talk first and just dive straight into the system and try to plow through anything there like the Zhukov's Red Army?

This reader would like that very much. Especially if they maintain OpSec.

I reasoned further upwind that my strategy, if I were the SLN, would be to throw a KISS to the wind and launch two simultaneous prongs of attack at both Manticore and Beowulf.

ChronicRder wrote:What is the likelihood of the Mandarans expediting the refit of the 2,000 or so wallers currently being done and throwing a couple thousand of the wall at Beowulf...or anywhere else against the alliance for that matter?
At 2nd Manticore, ADM Filareta said (and I paraphrase) "alright, hail the Manties, see if they're done changing their breeches after 400 of the wall warping in." Said Manties didn't bat and eye and we know how that ended. What if the SLN decides to try a modern Farley's Crossing and and drop 3-5x what Filareta had just to try to get a reaction from the GA and Beowulf? To drive home the point, they don't even try to talk first and just dive straight into the system and try to plow through anything there like the Zhukov's Red Army?

The likelihood is about nil.

Ships need crews. SLN ships apparently need to be stuffed with crews and still don't have emergency access hatches and lighting well maintained. There is no plan for crewing the Reserve. They're not getting crewed without a plan. I doubt there is a serious plan for de-mothballing, much less refitting, the Reserve at all quickly, and even serious plans can fall short of reality when they're not practiced.

They can't afford to activate the Reserve even, if they had the time, the people, and the yards for it.

And after all that, they'd still be deathtraps, which won't help get them crewed at all.

If they showed up with 2000 wallers and made no effort to talk, all it would mean would be some blinking and surprise aboard GA flag bridges, some stern questions for staff intelligence officers - and a few shrugs followed by 2000 SLN wallers getting scrapped and 10 million dead at Beowulf aboard those wallers.

JeffEngel wrote:
...snip...
a few shrugs ....

Shrugs with an almost Gallic insouciance?

JeffEngel wrote:The likelihood is about nil.

Actually, there is textev that it exactly nil. Adm Kingsford briefed Permanent-under-secretary Kolikoltsov on the change to commerce raiding because the ships (SDs) in the reserve "are the wrong ships for this war."

Kolikolstov's unstated reaction is "how are we going to build new ships when we can't even afford to reactivate the reserve." (owtte)

Just where is Kingsford going to find crews for 500 or even 100 SDs at this point?

If you pull trained people out of existing ships you are going to get some but at best you are going to be getting training cadre, not put the de-mothballed ships into imediate fighting condition. How many trained people do you need to fight an SD? If the crew is in the 4000 size you dam well better have more than 1000 to start moving them. Perhaps the new people could assist in the recommissioning work but perhaps not.

Does the League have 400,000 previously trained and current on their qualifications for the proper jobs on SDs waiting in the Reserve pool for the SLN? That's everything from engine room and power plant people to scan/tactical watch-standers to enviornmental crew, missle and lightspeed weapons tech and gunners. How about mess personel and cooks (though somewhat lower critical need for proficiency. Or medical?
If they have them with the abilities to step right from the civilian/reserve status to active duty in a combat zone, where are they and how soon can you get them from their present locations to where they need to be just to step aboard their "new" ships?

And all those "reservist" people who are still/already serving aboard civilian merchant shipping (which the League now desperatly needs both in civiilan and military shipping) are going to be somewhat difficult to grab from wherever they are and thrown back into the SLN to fill all critical knowledge and operations slots in even enlisted jobs and skils.

How long does it take to put ONE Reserve Fleet SD back into commission or even just functional to safely ( somewhat important) get into hyperspace and fire it's weapons at any target? What capasity does the Reserve Fleet depots have as far as working on multiple ships at one time? If it takes a month to make one fully operational, can they do five at the same time?

Of course, it is possible that you can take the ships as they come out of the reserve with the partialy (very ) trained crews and use them to sit in various "guard" positions to free up ships which are already on active duty to move to places where they might be able to function in cowing some system until they become dust bunnies when they finally face a modern GA force.

We are back to the time left before the SL fractures. That doesn't mean that perhaps even quite a few of the Reserve ships will get put back into some kind of fighting capacity. Can't tell you when the League will breakdown or when and in what form will the surviving SLN continue as even part of the SDFs of the fragments, but probably not long enough to make a difference.

Brigade XO wrote:Just where is Kingsford going to find crews for 500 or even 100 SDs at this point?

Who cares? He's said, in textev, that he's not even going to try.

They had plenty of time to jump out. IIRC, the Peep commander considered doing exactly that - and if he'd been working for anyone beside the CPS he probably would have done it. Mind you, it wouldn't surprise me at all if he'd then come back after just enough time had gone by to let people start saying 'OK, it's over. Time to stand down'; unfortunately, taking those sorts of liberties with the Plan was above his pay grade. As it was, his assessment was that he could still achieve at least the first of his assigned objectives, meaning that in practice he had no option other than making the attempt. Given what the Peeps knew about Alliance capabilities at the time, he was justified. What he was really trapped by was confidence in their intel for the op, which delayed the _re_-assessment of the accumulating data that things weren't what they seemed that might have led him to pull the plug after all.

C. O. Thompson wrote:

munroburton wrote:
Nope, the Havenite force assigned to attack the Basilisk terminus missed its target and overshot. Their plan was to carry some velocity over from the alpha wall and emerge short of the target, so they'd be on an intercept course.

They emerged beyond the target, moving away from it. Jumping back out would cost even more time than reversing course and there was no guarantee of microjumping onto an intercept course from such a close range anyway.

OK munroburton, could they have jumped out of the system to avoid conflict??? Any way I think Jonathan answered my confusion but I understood the real question was about alliance ships jumping into Beowulf to counter an attack by SLN

If you read a few of my posts in the past you may have seen me state "I have been rong before..."

There are additional wallers available:

From Mission of Honor:

"Which is why the redeployment of our active wall is designed to concentrate no fewer than an additional five hundred wallers on Tasmania—this time with complete logistical support and a powerful Frontier Fleet screen—within two and a half months. In three months' time, that total will reach six hundred. Which means we'll be able to dispatch a second wave, substantially larger and even more powerfully supported, against Manticore within a maximum of five months—long before they will have been able to restore sufficient industrial capacity to reammunition their own ships."

David Weber. Mission of Honor (Kindle Locations 12336-12340). Baen Books.

So there are at least another 600 units around Tasmania. So where in relation to Beowulf is Tasmania?

CRC wrote:There are additional wallers available:

From Mission of Honor:

"Which is why the redeployment of our active wall is designed to concentrate no fewer than an additional five hundred wallers on Tasmania—this time with complete logistical support and a powerful Frontier Fleet screen—within two and a half months. In three months' time, that total will reach six hundred. Which means we'll be able to dispatch a second wave, substantially larger and even more powerfully supported, against Manticore within a maximum of five months—long before they will have been able to restore sufficient industrial capacity to reammunition their own ships."

David Weber. Mission of Honor (Kindle Locations 12336-12340). Baen Books.

So there are at least another 600 units around Tasmania. So where in relation to Beowulf is Tasmania?

http://www.gotshifted.com/honorverseglo ... %20ART.png

Tasmania is probably close to the Beowulf-Manticore bridge line, somewhere in the Shell. It could be in the Protectorates but that seems a lower probability to me. If so, that force is better placed to attack Beowulf than Manticore.