Scenario of War with the League

To address the original post however, there's little to no difference between 1920's SEM and what actually went to war. Apollo was simply a continuation step, and actually was already out of R&D in 1920. Aollo was fielded testing and by 1921 completed it's first in-action test, when it killed Giscard and wiped out the fleets guarding Lovat.

So contrary to your actual thoughts

Sigs wrote:Technologically the SLN is a lot closer to the Allied fleet using the above restriction than it is in the series it is by no means equal, but it is closer.

Manticore/GA are in an even more overhwelming position. They have their full technical advantages, and they haven't lost their manufacturing capabilities. It was Oyster Bay that really sparked them for even thinking they could send Filareta with a hope of success and that "double down intimidation" mixed with the bully mentalities.

Without OB, the League Mandarins would already have been wavering, although they wouldn't have Beowulf already starting to withdraw from the League. It was, after all, Operation Raging Justice that really cause Beowulf to start withdrawing from the League, which is what really set the house shaking apart.

Sigs wrote:The League has about 2,000 planets while the Alliance has somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 systems.

The League outnumbers the Alliance population by a wide margin, their size is ~20 times greater than the Alliance but they have limited naval shipbuilding at the moment as well as a large portion of systems that would love nothing more than to get away from the league. Politically, economically, industry wise and militarily all else remains.

What are the chances of the League surviving the war in one piece or even as a nation at all?

Like I said above, the League's in more or less a worse military position than it was without messing with the official timeline, economically it's also likely to still be in the same hole of being barred from all wormholes.

Politically, however, with Beowulf possibly not threatening to secede from the League, they might be in a slightly better position. But with the military/economic positions being the same or worse, they're still pretty screwed and the Harrington Doctrine will be the order of the day.

What if the Moon was made of green cheese and Rome never fell?

The reason the GA formed was the exposure of the Alignment after Oyster Bay. No Alignmnt instigation of problems from the time on King Roger forward still means that Haven and Manticore (and the Manticore Alliance against Haven- defensive) go to war and then the various parts and tech unfold more or less along the same lines. You can even argue that the same problems evolve in the diplomatic communications between Haven and Manticore since it was internal politics on both sides that did that.
Manticore still pushes R&D and you end up with MDMs, CLACs/modern LACs and Manticore fTL communications.

The Aldermani may or may not reach an accomodation with Manticore over Silesia but Haven does suck them into the war with the goings on leading up to and connected with Haven striking at the RMN base out there and demonstrating that Haven is going to come out into Aldermani territory right after it "cleans up" their problem with Manticore.

The SL DOESN'T get Cataphracts. Byng, Crandall and Fillerta don't get pushed out to where they are positioned to strike at Manticore. The SL is still unhappy with Manticore for the amount of volume and control of merchant shipping within the League and the Junction BUT that is mostly the size of it without the manufactured incidents to drive the problems and inflame the League government.
Heck, that leaves - possibly- Mike and what becomes 10th Fleet in-system when Haven initiates 1st Manticore and that shifts the outcome such that Manticore takes fewer ultimate casualties/Haven still loosesl and Honor goes to Haven a bit earlier with a different list of terms for Haven. No Haven/Manticore alliance but a different brokered peace since the leadership of Manticore is still going to recognize that they can't occupy and supress the entire Haven collection of systems.

You have -probably- an end of the Manticore-Haven war, the ENTIRE Manticore and Grayson manufacturing and shipbuilding infrastructures intact and cranking out MODERN RMN/GSN warships and weapons systems inlcuding Apollo and MDMs.

And what happens then? The SL bureacrats decide along with various transtellar interests to try and push in the edges of Manticore's trade empire? Just how are they going to do that? Actually, why are they going to do that except attempt to grow outward with OFS/FF snipping off Verge systems. Manticore still gets Talbott Quadrant but without the Alignment meddling. OFS is going to get blocked in expansion that way but not forced into shooting situations on the scale that were PROVOKED by an outside party. If the SL decides it wants to use force against Manticore to break the dominance of trade, it is still going to discover it is in a MASSIVE tech and experience hole even 5- 10 years down the road since there will be NO pressing reason for anybody in SLN to notice and then impliment any of the Manticore/Haven improvements in military tech and tactics untill AFTER they run up against them at such time as they attempt to push Manticore.

Relax wrote:Actually, showing up and blowing away all of the SLN ships is very easily doable. We have already gone through the numbers several times over....

Yes, in the scenario that RFC wrote, Manticore alone only needs to worry about running out of ammo before the SLN runs out of ships.

However, in Sigs' alternate-Honorverse the outcome is not so cut and dried.

In the postulated world, Haven just laughs at 8th fleet if it shows up at Haven. The fortresses and fleet defenses would eat it alive.

In either this hypothetical case, or the actual case, the calculations are more or less the same. Can the Grand Alliance fracture the Solarian League and break its political unity before the Solarian League can mobilize its latent (but as yet unrealized) military capacity and crush them?

I think everyone agrees that given enough time, a unified Solarian League will defeat the Grand Alliance in a war. We can disagree on the actual amount of time required: that depends on how quickly the Solarian League can re-tool their economic capacity, rewrite their constitution to allow for greater taxation (or nationalize expanded system self-defense forces), and narrow the qualitative edge enough to allow quantity to be the decisive variable once again.

The problem is that the Solarian League doesn't have enough time. The league is a political mess, and all the measures needed to do any of the things I note above will just further the political fracturing, as long as Manticore doesn't do anything that would give the League the political capital it needs to stay unified. We don't know all that much about Core World politics and preferences, but the periphery wants out (and will be gone in the next book, I suspect), which is going to both wreck the Solarian League's finances and undermine confidence in the league.

These calculations don't really matter much re: the Mesan Alignment. The Alignment represents an "x" variable, and is contributing to the fragmentation of the League independent of (or, perhaps, in effective cooperation with) Manticore. Whatever Mesa's doing, they are certainly putting more pressure on the wedges that are fracturing the league, which shrinks the League's available time and political capital. Whether Mesa will be decisive on that count or not I suspect we'll never know for sure.

Weird Harold wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:From some details dropped in the books and by Duckk we know the performance numbers of the SLN Javelin missile's drive; and they're about 1.5% better than the pre-ERM missiles the RMN had. Manticore probably still had an edge in sensors and ECM, but not in raw drive.

Here's the latest RMN SDM I've got numbers on:
100% power 60s @ 92000g = burnout after 1,656,000 km at 0.18c
50% power 180s @ 46000g = burnout after 7,452,000 km at 0.28c

And for comparison the Javelin numbers:
100% power 60s @ 93400g = burnout after 1,681,200 km at 0.19c
50% power 180s @ 46700g = burnout after 7,565,400 km at 0.28c

Admittedly 1.5% better accel and range isn't much, but it certainly means they aren't outranged by RMN SDMs.

Sigs wrote:...no multistage missiles so missile technology is at around 1910 level ...

I don't quibble about the details quite as much as some, but I'm pretty sure the RMN was using ERM and LERM missiles in 1910. Sigs chose his alternate history point to leave a tech advantage to the RMN, I just don't think it would be enough advantage to insure a "win" against the SLN.

I just looked and the first ship (that I know of) that was designed to fire ERMs was the Sag-B cruiser; which HoS tells me wasn't introduced until 1917 -- which tracks since the first time I remember reading about them (not that they were called ERMs at the time) was in War of Honor with HMS Jessica Epps.

Now there probably were minor improvements in missile acceleration prior to the endurance breakthrough of the ERM; looking at my compilation of missile data spreadsheet the RMN's mid-to-late 1st war SDM numbers (the ones I went with) are about 8% higher than the numbers given in the appendix of book 3 (SVW).

So it seems there wasn't much if any missile drive performance gain between OBS and SVW.
Then during the war there were incremental improvements in acceleration (but unchanged run time)
Sometime before 1912 the "baffle" breakthrough allowed MDMs; though each drive had the same accel/endurance as the current SDMs
Probably around 1915-1916 was the endurance breakthrough bringing about the ERMs (and slightly later LERMs)
The, (presumably) another year or so they had the microfusion power source that allowed practical downsizing of MDMs into DDMs.

Relax wrote:Actually, showing up and blowing away all of the SLN ships is very easily doable. We have already gone through the numbers several times over. Could do so in a matter of 2 months. So, militarily defeating the SLN is quite simple. Defeating the SL on the other hand is an impossible task with their population base. Its like Singapore conquering all of the world.

The Star Kingdom of Manticore doing so would be like that. But the Grand Alliance? I'm not sure that would be proportionally more difficult than, say, Rome conquering most of Europe and thereabouts or Great Britain conquering a rather large portion of Earth (which, y'know, they did). Haven is pretty big; it's a non-trivial percentage of the size of the League on its own. Heck, from a numbers perspective, it probably makes more sense to think about this as Haven vs the League, not Manticore vs the League.

Jonathan_S wrote: technology is at around 1910 level ...

I don't quibble about the details quite as much as some, but I'm pretty sure the RMN was using ERM and LERM missiles in 1910. Sigs chose his alternate history point to leave a tech advantage to the RMN, I just don't think it would be enough advantage to insure a "win" against the SLN.[/quote]I just looked and the first ship (that I know of) that was designed to fire ERMs was the Sag-B cruiser; which HoS tells me wasn't introduced until 1917 -- which tracks since the first time I remember reading about them (not that they were called ERMs at the time) was in War of Honor with HMS Jessica Epps.

Now there probably were minor improvements in missile acceleration prior to the endurance breakthrough of the ERM; looking at my compilation of missile data spreadsheet the RMN's mid-to-late 1st war SDM numbers (the ones I went with) are about 8% higher than the numbers given in the appendix of book 3 (SVW).

So it seems there wasn't much if any missile drive performance gain between OBS and SVW.
Then during the war there were incremental improvements in acceleration (but unchanged run time)
Sometime before 1912 the "baffle" breakthrough allowed MDMs; though each drive had the same accel/endurance as the current SDMs
Probably around 1915-1916 was the endurance breakthrough bringing about the ERMs (and slightly later LERMs)
The, (presumably) another year or so they had the microfusion power source that allowed practical downsizing of MDMs into DDMs.[/quote]

It probably should be noted, in the HoS short story, King Roger talks with the Gram team about Multidrive missile technology - it's being investigated prior to his death and the all-important baffle is mentioned then. This, of course means that the MDM was under development for ~40 years, and various incarnations may have been available earlier than what we saw fielded. As was, the Minotaur fielded the first shipborn MDMs in 1912 - larger versions probably had been in field tests for several years removing the kinks (and excess weight).

kzt wrote:I will again point out that the leadership of the SEM was highly confident that, without the use of outside sources, they could rebuild their shipyards to be producing light ships in 2 years and SDs in 4 years. This is without any industrial base and with having to recruit and train an entire workforce.

Why do you think it would take 50 years for someone who has a fully intact modern industrial base and a large highly experienced workforce?

Because if you are a core system that has a lot of industrial potential but no ship yards you are looking at having to train the ship yard workers, design the ships from the ground up with potentially little to no experience in warship designs and build the ship yards before you even get to construction. And then you get to start training the naval crew for each and every ship, if the SDF had 20,30 or 50 SD's then you have an experienced core of navy personnel with a solid logistic and training base but if you start with 50 LAC's how would you turn the 500 person navy into a one that has 500,000 or a million personnel in only 3 or 4 years?

And how would you do all that military and industrial expansion while a significant portion of the transport capability that the League depends on vanishes?

Theemile wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:I just looked and the first ship (that I know of) that was designed to fire ERMs was the Sag-B cruiser; which HoS tells me wasn't introduced until 1917 -- which tracks since the first time I remember reading about them (not that they were called ERMs at the time) was in War of Honor with HMS Jessica Epps.

Now there probably were minor improvements in missile acceleration prior to the endurance breakthrough of the ERM; looking at my compilation of missile data spreadsheet the RMN's mid-to-late 1st war SDM numbers (the ones I went with) are about 8% higher than the numbers given in the appendix of book 3 (SVW).

So it seems there wasn't much if any missile drive performance gain between OBS and SVW.
Then during the war there were incremental improvements in acceleration (but unchanged run time)
Sometime before 1912 the "baffle" breakthrough allowed MDMs; though each drive had the same accel/endurance as the current SDMs
Probably around 1915-1916 was the endurance breakthrough bringing about the ERMs (and slightly later LERMs)
The, (presumably) another year or so they had the microfusion power source that allowed practical downsizing of MDMs into DDMs.

It probably should be noted, in the HoS short story, King Roger talks with the Gram team about Multidrive missile technology - it's being investigated prior to his death and the all-important baffle is mentioned then. This, of course means that the MDM was under development for ~40 years, and various incarnations may have been available earlier than what we saw fielded. As was, the Minotaur fielded the first shipborn MDMs in 1912 - larger versions probably had been in field tests for several years removing the kinks (and excess weight).

Sure, I guess I should have phrased that better because the "baffle", and I'm sure the increased node endurance, weren't single breakthroughs. They were the result of, as you say, decades of focused R&D that eventually led to first operational deployments around the timelines I indicated.

I'd tried to keep that in mind in my original post about comparitive single-drive missiles; specifically in that I didn't state that the RMN wouldn't have ERMs based on the timeline. Instead I said that if Sigs' alternate timeline hadn't developed them then the SLN would seem to slightly outrange the RMN.
In the actual timeline they were likely in development at the point in time Sigs wants his alternate war to start; but because (unlike MDMs) he didn't specifically address them I don't know whether he also intended to RMN to have failed to (yet) develop ERMs or not.


Though it's also possible that if Manticore hadn't had success with MDMs or ERMs, that they'd have sunk more R&D into improving SDM drives - so they might have managed more than an 8% improvement since OBS/SVW; and have actually had the accel/range advantage over the Javelin.